I've been learning about Lie Groups, Lie Algebras and moment maps and my aim is to get to Sympletic Reduction. Currently I'm struggling with a few details of the definition of hamiltonian action from Ana da Cannas Silva's book on Sympletic Geometry. Here's the definition:
Let $(M,\omega)$ be a sympletic manifold, $G$ be a Lie Group, $\mathfrak{g}$ be the Lie Algebra of $G$, $\mathfrak{g}^*$ the dual vector space of $\mathfrak{g}$ and $$\psi:G\to\text{Symp}(M,\omega)$$ a sympletic action. Then $\psi$ is a $\textbf{hamiltonian action}$ if there exists a map $$\mu:M\to\mathfrak{g}^*$$ satisfying:
- For each $X\in\mathfrak{g}$, let
- $\mu^X:M\to\mathbb{R},\mu^X(p):=\left<\mu(p),X\right>$ be the component of $\mu$ along $X$ (she a few pages before that $\left<\cdot,\cdot\right>$ is just the natural pairing between $\mathfrak{g}^*$ and $\mathfrak{g}$)
- $X^\#$ be the vector field on $M$ generated by the one parameter subgroup $\{\exp tX\mid t\in\mathbb{R}\}\subset G$.
Then $$d\mu^X=\imath_{X^\#}\omega$$ i.e., $\mu^X$ is a hamiltonian function for the vector field $X^\#$.
- $\mu$ is equivariant with respect to the given action $\psi$ of $G$ on $M$ and the coadjoint action $\text{Ad}_g^*$ of $G$ on $\mathfrak{g}^*$: $$\mu\circ\psi_g=\text{Ad}^*\circ \mu$$
For connected Lie Groups, hamiltonian actions can be equivalently defined in terms of the $\textbf{comoment map}$ $$\mu^*:\mathfrak{g}\to C^\infty(M),$$ with the two conditions rephrased as:
- $\mu^*(X):=\mu^X$ is a hamiltonian function for the vector field $X^\#$,
- $\mu^*$ is a Lie Algebra homomorphism: $$\mu^*\left[X,Y\right]=\left\{\mu^*(X),\mu^*(Y)\right\}$$ where $\left\{\cdot,\cdot\right\}$ is the Poisson bracket on $C^\infty(M)$
So my questions are:
- How is $\{\exp tX\mid t\in\mathbb{R}\}$ a subset of $G$? As far as I understood from the places I've read $\exp tX$ is just the flow of $X$. I've seen this more than once, is it just abuse of notation for $\exp tX(e)$ where $e$ is the identity in $G$?
- Why are the conditions 2. equivalent? I'd also appreciate any intuition on why we want this condition to hold.
- Why do we need to assume that the Lie Group is connected for the second definition to be valid?
Maybe some/all of these are really obvious but it's a lot of new stuff at once. Any help on any of the questions is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.