p-brane Newton--Cartan Geometry

Abstract: We provide a formal definition of p-brane Newton--Cartan (pNC) geometry and establish some foundational results. Our approach is the same followed in the literature for foundations of Newton--Cartan Gravity. Our results provide control of aspects of pNC geometry that are otherwise unclear when using the usual gauge language of non-relativistic theories of gravity. In particular, we obtain a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that a pNC structure must satisfy in order to admit torsion-free, compatible affine connections, and determine the space formed by the latter. Since pNC structures interpolate between Leibnizian structures for p=0 and Lorentzian structures for p=d-1 (with d the dimension of the spacetime manifold), the present work also constitutes a generalisation of results of Newton--Cartan and (pseudo-) Riemannian geometry.