Polarisation of Graded Bundles

Abstract

We construct the full linearisation functor which takes a graded bundle of degree k (a particular kind of graded manifold) and produces a k-fold vector bundle. We fully characterise the image of the full linearisation functor and show that we obtain a subcategory of k-fold vector bundles consisting of symmetric k-fold vector bundles equipped with a family of morphisms indexed by the symmetric group Sk. Interestingly, for the degree 2 case this additional structure gives rise to the notion of a symplectical double vector bundle, which is the skew-symmetric analogue of a metric double vector bundle. We also discuss the related case of fully linearising N-manifolds, and how one can use the full linearisation functor to ''superise'' a graded bundle.