We study Nijenhuis operators, that is, (1, 1)-tensors with vanishing Nijenhuis torsion under the additional assumption that they are gl-regular, i.e., every eigenvalue has geometric multiplicity one. We prove the existence of a coordinate system in which the operator takes first or second companion form, and give a local description of such operators. We apply this local description to study singular points. In particular, we obtain normal forms of gl-regular Nijenhuis operators near singular points in dimension two and discover topological restrictions for the existence of gl-regular Nijenhuis operators on closed surfaces.This paper is an important step in the research programme suggested in [5,10].
Basic definitions and main resultsGiven a (1, 1) tensor field L on a manifold M n , one defines the Nijenhuis torsion of L aswhere ξ, η are arbitrary vector fields. If N L identically vanishes, then L is said to be a Nijenhuis operator.Nijenhuis geometry studies Nijenhuis operators and their properties, both local and global. A research programme and general strategy for studying such operators were suggested in [5]. This paper is devoted to the next item of our agenda (after [5], [6], [8], [16]) and is focused on Nijenhuis operators satisfying gl-regularity condition.We start with the following equivalent definitions of gl-regular operators L : R n → R n , see e.g. Wikipedia [27,28] (the same notation L will be used for the matrix corresponding to this operator, with appropriate amendments under coordinate transformations if necessary):• L is a regular element of the Lie algebra gl(n, R) in the sense that the adjoint orbit O(L) = {P LP −1 | P ∈ GL(n, R)} ⊂ gl(n, R) has maximal dimension.