Tangent spaces of diffeological spaces and their variants

Abstract

Several methods have been proposed to define tangent spaces for diffeological spaces. Among them, the internal tangent functor is obtained as the left Kan extension of the tangent functor for manifolds. However, the right Kan extension of the same functor has not been well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between this right Kan extension and the external tangent space, another type of tangent space for diffeological spaces. We prove that by slightly modifying the inclusion functor used in the right Kan extension, we obtain a right tangent space functor, which is almost isomorphic to the external tangent space. Furthermore, we show that when a diffeological space satisfies a favorable property called smoothly regular, this right tangent space coincides with the right Kan extension mentioned earlier.