A characterization of differential bundles in tangent categories

Abstract: A tangent category is a categorical abstraction of the tangent bundle construction for smooth manifolds. In that context, Cockett and Cruttwell develop the notion of differential bundle which, by work of MacAdam, generalizes the notion of smooth vector bundle to the abstract setting. Here we provide a new characterization of differential bundles and show that, up to isomorphism, a differential bundle is determined by its projection map and zero section. We show how these results can be used to quickly identify differential bundles in various tangent categories.