Exterior derivative

On a differentiable manifold, the exterior derivative extends the concept of the differential of a function to differential forms of higher degree. The exterior derivative was first described in its current form by Élie Cartan in 1899. It allows for a natural, metric-independent generalization of Stokes' theorem, Gauss's theorem, and Green's theorem from vector calculus.
If a differential -form is thought of as measuring the flux through an infinitesimal -parallelotope at each point of the manifold, then its exterior derivative can be thought of as measuring the net flux through the boundary of a -parallelotope at each point.
Definition.
The exterior derivative of a differential form of degree (also differential -form, or just -form for brevity here) is a differential form of degree .
If is a smooth function (a -form), then the exterior derivative of is the differential of . That is, is the unique -form such that for every smooth vector field , , where is the directional derivative of in the direction of .
The exterior product of differential forms (denoted with the same symbol ) is defined as their pointwise exterior product.
There are a variety of equivalent definitions of the exterior derivative of a general -form.
In terms of axioms.
The exterior derivative is defined to be the unique -linear mapping from -forms to -forms that has the following properties:
The second defining property holds in more generality: for any -form ; more succinctly, . The third defining property implies as a special case that if is a function and a is -form, then because a function is a -form, and scalar multiplication and the exterior product are equivalent when one of the arguments is a scalar.
In terms of local coordinates.
Alternatively, one can work entirely in a local coordinate system . The coordinate differentials form a basis of the space of one-forms, each associated with a coordinate. Given a multi-index with for (and denoting with an abuse of notation ), the exterior derivative of a (simple) -form
over is defined as
(using the Einstein summation convention). The definition of the exterior derivative is extended linearly to a general -form
where each of the components of the multi-index run over all the values in . Note that whenever equals one of the components of the multi-index then (see "Exterior product").
The definition of the exterior derivative in local coordinates follows from the preceding definition in terms of axioms. Indeed, with the -form as defined above,
Here, we have interpreted as a -form, and then applied the properties of the exterior derivative.
This result extends directly to the general -form as
In particular, for a -form , the components of in local coordinates are
"Caution": There are two conventions regarding the meaning of formula_7. Most current authors have the convention that 
while in older text like Kobayashi and Nomizu or Helgason 
In terms of invariant formula.
Alternatively, an explicit formula can be given for the exterior derivative of a -form , when paired with arbitrary smooth vector fields :
where denotes the Lie bracket and a hat denotes the omission of that element:
In particular, when is a -form we have that .
Note: With the conventions of e.g., Kobayashi–Nomizu and Helgason the formula differs by a factor of :
Examples.
Example 1. Consider over a -form basis for a scalar field . The exterior derivative is:
The last formula follows easily from the properties of the exterior product. Namely, .
Example 2. Let be a -form defined over . By applying the above formula to each term (consider and ) we have the following sum,
Stokes' theorem on manifolds.
If is a compact smooth orientable -dimensional manifold with boundary, and is an -form on , then the generalized form of Stokes' theorem states that:
Intuitively, if one thinks of as being divided into infinitesimal regions, and one adds the flux through the boundaries of all the regions, the interior boundaries all cancel out, leaving the total flux through the boundary of .
Further properties.
Closed and exact forms.
A -form is called "closed" if ; closed forms are the kernel of . is called "exact" if for some -form ; exact forms are the image of . Because , every exact form is closed. The Poincaré lemma states that in a contractible region, the converse is true.
de Rham cohomology.
Because the exterior derivative has the property that , it can be used as the differential (coboundary) to define de Rham cohomology on a manifold. The -th de Rham cohomology (group) is the vector space of closed -forms modulo the exact -forms; as noted in the previous section, the Poincaré lemma states that these vector spaces are trivial for a contractible region, for . For smooth manifolds, integration of forms gives a natural homomorphism from the de Rham cohomology to the singular cohomology over . The theorem of de Rham shows that this map is actually an isomorphism, a far-reaching generalization of the Poincaré lemma. As suggested by the generalized Stokes' theorem, the exterior derivative is the "dual" of the boundary map on singular simplices.
Naturality.
The exterior derivative is natural in the technical sense: if is a smooth map and is the contravariant smooth functor that assigns to each manifold the space of -forms on the manifold, then the following diagram commutes
so , where denotes the pullback of . This follows from that , by definition, is , being the pushforward of . Thus is a natural transformation from to .
Exterior derivative in vector calculus.
Most vector calculus operators are special cases of, or have close relationships to, the notion of exterior differentiation.
Gradient.
A smooth function on a real differentiable manifold is a -form. The exterior derivative of this -form is the -form .
When an inner product is defined, the gradient of a function is defined as the unique vector in such that its inner product with any element of is the directional derivative of along the vector, that is such that
That is,
where denotes the musical isomorphism mentioned earlier that is induced by the inner product.
The -form is a section of the cotangent bundle, that gives a local linear approximation to in the cotangent space at each point.
Divergence.
A vector field on has a corresponding -form
where formula_19 denotes the omission of that element.
(For instance, when , i.e. in three-dimensional space, the -form is locally the scalar triple product with .) The integral of over a hypersurface is the flux of over that hypersurface.
The exterior derivative of this -form is the -form
Curl.
A vector field on also has a corresponding -form
Locally, is the dot product with . The integral of along a path is the work done against along that path.
When , in three-dimensional space, the exterior derivative of the -form is the -form
Invariant formulations of operators in vector calculus.
The standard vector calculus operators can be generalized for any pseudo-Riemannian manifold, and written in coordinate-free notation as follows:
where is the Hodge star operator, and are the musical isomorphisms, is a scalar field and is a vector field.
Note that the expression for requires to act on , which is a form of degree . A natural generalization of to -forms of arbitrary degree allows this expression to make sense for any .