Coregular submanifolds and Poisson submersions

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze submersions with Poisson fibres. These are submersions whose total space carries a Poisson structure, on which the ambient Poisson structure pulls back, as a Dirac structure, to Poisson structures on each individual fibre. Our “Poisson–Dirac viewpoint” is prompted by natural examples of Poisson submersions with Poisson fibres – in toric geometry and in Poisson–Lie groups – whose analysis was not possible using the existing tools in the Poisson literature. The first part of the paper studies the Poisson–Dirac perspective of inducing Poisson structures on submanifolds. This is a rich landscape, in which subtle behaviours abound, as illustrated by a surprising “jumping phenomenon” concerning the complex relation between the induced and the ambient symplectic foliations, which we discovered here. These pathologies, however, are absent from the well-behaved and abundant class of coregular submanifolds, with which we are mostly concerned here. The second part of the paper studies Poisson submersions with Poisson fibres – the natural Poisson generalization of flat symplectic bundles. These Poisson submersions have coregular Poisson–Dirac fibres, and behave functorially with respect to such submanifolds. We discuss the subtle collective behavior of the Poisson fibres of such Poisson fibrations, and explain their relation to pencils of Poisson structures. The third and final part applies the theory developed to Poisson submersions with Poisson fibres which arise in Lie theory. We also show that such submersions are a convenient setting for the associated bundle construction, and we illustrate this by producing new Poisson structures with a finite number of symplectic leaves. Some of the points in the paper being fairly new, we illustrate the many fine issues that appear with an abundance of (counter-)examples.