Wagner Lift of Riemannian metric to Orthogonal Frame Bundle

Jose Ricardo Arteaga, Mikhail Malakhaltsev

Published 2009-01-03, updated 2010-02-20Version 2

In the present work we construct a lift of a metric $g$ on a 2-dimensional oriented Riemannian manifold $M$ to a metric $\hat{g}$ on the total space $P$ of the orthonormal frame bundle of $M$. We call this lift the \textit {Wagner lift}. Viktor Vladimirovich Wagner (1908 -1981) proposed a technique to extend a metric defined on a non-holonomic distribution to its prolongation via the Lie brackets. We apply the Wagner construction to the specific case when the distribution is the infinitesimal connection in the orthonormal frame bundle which corresponds to a Levi-Civita connection. We find relations between the geometry of the Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ and of the total space $(P,G)$ of the orthonormal frame bundle endowed with the lifted metric.