Elastic diffeological spaces

Abstract

We introduce a class of diffeological spaces, called elastic, on which the left Kan extension of the tangent functor of smooth manifolds defines an abstract tangent functor in the sense of Rosický. On elastic spaces there is a natural Cartan calculus, consisting of vector fields and differential forms, together with the Lie bracket, de Rham differential, inner derivative, and Lie derivative, satisfying the usual graded commutation relations. Elastic spaces are closed under arbitrary coproducts, finite products, and retracts. Examples include manifolds with corners and cusps, diffeological groups and diffeological vector spaces with a mild extra condition, mapping spaces between smooth manifolds, and spaces of sections of smooth fiber bundles.