Paper detail

Jacobi structures and Spencer operators

This paper explains the fundamental relation between Jacobi structures and the classical Spencer operator coming from the theory of PDEs so as to provide a direct and geometric approach to the integrability of Jacobi structures. It uses recent results on the integrability of Spencer operators and multliplicative forms on Lie groupoids with non-trivial coefficients. In Theorem 1 we show that the Spencer operator associated to a contact groupoid reveals that the base manifold carries a Jacobi structure. Theorem 2 deals with the problem of integrating Jacobi structures to contact groupoids.