Orientation of a Manifold with Trivial Tangential Bundle

orientationsmooth-manifoldstangent-bundle

Let $M$ be a smooth (eg $C^{\infty}$) manifold. Let assume that $M$ has trivial, oriented tangent bundle $TM$, so $TM \cong M \times \mathbb{R}^n$ for appropriate $n$ and orientable.

How to conclude that in this case $M$ is also orientable?

My considerations:

I use the orientability criterion with charts: eg a manifold $N$ is orientable iff there exists an atlas $(\phi_i:U_i \to V_i)_{i \in I}$ with $U_i \subset N, V_i \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ with following property:

for all $i,j \in I$ with $U_i \cap U_j \neq \varnothing$ the differential $D_p(\phi_j \circ \phi_j^{-1}) =T_p(\phi_j \circ \phi_j^{-1})$ of restricted map $\phi_j \circ \phi_j^{-1} \vert _{U_i \cap U_j}$ at every $p \in U_i \cap U_j $ has positive determinant.

An attempt is to start with product charts for the oriented (by assumption) tangent bundle of the shape $\phi_i \times id_{\mathbb{R}^n}$ which form an oriented atlas for $TM \cong M \times \mathbb{R}^n$ and trying to restrict them to charts $\phi_i$ is a sophisticated way (modyfying them by multiplying if neccessary with $\pm 1$ in appropriate cases ) to get an induces oriented atlas on $M$. But I'm not sure how and if that could work. Does anybody have a better idea?

Remark: Since every tangent bundle of a manifold is oriented I think that the triviality of $TM$ is the main ingredient here.

Best Answer

Your assumption of a trivialization $f: M\times \Bbb R^n \to TM$ yields, for each $p\in M$, a linear isomorphism $f_p:\Bbb R^n \to T_pM$ given by the composition of $f|_{\{p\}\times \Bbb R^n}$ with the identification $\{p\}\times \Bbb R^n \approx \Bbb R^n$.

Now let $\cal A$ be the maximal atlas for $M$. For any chart $(\phi_j,U_j) \in \cal A$, say that $\phi_j$ is "good" if for all $p\in U_j$, $$\det\left[(D_p \phi_j) \circ f_p\right] > 0,$$ and that $\phi_j$ is "bad" otherwise. Now remove all of the "bad" charts from $\cal A$ to get a collection $\cal{B}$. Since any good chart can be obtained from a bad chart (and vice versa) by multiplying one of the coordinate functions by $-1$, $\cal{B}$ is an (nonmaximal) atlas.

You can check that the atlas $\cal{B}$ satisfies your specified orientation-preserving criterion (use the chain rule).

Edit (more details): for any pair of "good" charts, by the chain rule it follows that $$D_{\phi_j(p)}(\phi_i\circ \phi_j)^{-1} = \left[(D_{p}\phi_i)\circ f_{p}\right] \circ \left[(D_{p}\phi_j)\circ f_{p}\right]^{-1}, $$ which has positive determinant as desired.

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