Algebraic tubular neighbourhoods II.
The following two homotopic notions are important in many domains of differential geometry: - homotopic homomorphisms between principal bundles (and between other objects), - homotopic subbundles. They play a role, for example, in many fundamental problems of characteristic classes. It turns out that both these notions can be - in a natural way - expressed in the language of Lie algebroids. Moreover, the characteristic homomorphisms of principal bundles (the Chern-Weil homomorphism [K4], or the...