Dirac structures and Nijenhuis operators

Abstract: We introduce a notion of compatibility between (almost) Dirac structures and (1,1)-tensor fields extending that of Poisson-Nijenhuis structures. We study several properties of the "Dirac-Nijenhuis" structures thus obtained, including their connection with holomorphic Dirac structures, the geometry of their leaves and quotients, as well as the presence of hierarchies. We also consider their integration to Lie groupoids, which includes the integration of holomorphic Dirac structures as a special case.