Non-Natural Metrics on the Tangent Bundle

Abstract

Natural metrics provide a way to induce a metric on the tangent bundle from the metric on its base manifold. The most studied type is the Sasaki metric, which applies the base metric separately to the vertical and horizontal components. We study a more general class of metrics which introduces interactions between the vertical and horizontal components, with scalar weights. Additionally, we explicitly clarify how to apply our and other induced metrics on the tangent bundle to vector fields where the vertical component is not constant along the fibers. We give application to the Special Orthogonal Group SO(3) as an example.