Diffeological submanifolds and their friends

A smooth manifold hosts different types of submanifolds, including embedded, weakly-embedded, and immersed submanifolds. The notion of an immersed submanifold requires additional structure (namely, the choice of a topology); when this additional structure is unique, we call the subset a uniquely immersed submanifold. Diffeology provides yet another intrinsic notion of submanifold: a diffeological submanifold.

We show that from a categorical perspective diffeology rises above the others: viewing manifolds as a concrete category over the category of sets, the initial morphisms are exactly the (diffeological) inductions, which are the diffeomorphisms with diffeological submanifolds. Moreover, if we view manifolds as a concrete category over the category of topological spaces, we recover Joris and Preissmann's notion of pseudo-immersions.

We show that these notions are all different. In particular, a theorem of Joris from 1982 yields a diffeological submanifold whose inclusion is not an immersion, answering a question that was posed by Iglesias-Zemmour. We also characterize local inductions as those pseudo-immersions that are locally injective.

In appendices, we review a proof of Joris' theorem, pointing at a flaw in one of the several other proofs that occur in the literature, and we illustrate how submanifolds inherit paracompactness from their ambient manifold.