To a Lie groupoid over a compact base $M$, the associated group of bisection is an (infinite-dimensional) Lie group. Moreover, under certain circumstances one can reconstruct the Lie groupoid from its Lie group of bisections. In the present article we consider functorial aspects of these construction principles. The first observation is that this procedure is functorial (for morphisms fixing $M$). Moreover, it gives rise to an adjunction between the category of Lie groupoids over $M$ and the category of Lie groups acting on $M$. In the last section we then show how to promote this adjunction to almost an equivalence of categories.

A surface $\sum$ endowed with a Poisson tensor $\pi$ is known to admit a canonical integration, $G\left( \pi \right)$, which is a 4-dimensional manifold with a (symplectic) Lie groupoid structure. In this short note we show that if $\text{ }\!\!\pi\!\!\text{ }$ is not an area form on the 2-sphere, then $G\left( \pi \right)$ is diffeomorphic to the cotangent bundle $T*\sum$. This extends results by the author and by Bonechi, Ciccoli, Staffolani, and Tarlini.

We define an analytic index and prove a topological index theorem for a non-compact manifold M0 with poly-cylindrical ends. Our topological index theorem depends only on the principal symbol, and establishes the equality of the topological and analytical index in the group K0(C*(M)), where C*(M) is a canonical C*-algebra associated to the canonical compactification M of M0. Our topological index is thus, in general, not an integer, unlike the usual Fredholm index appearing in the Atiyah–Singer theorem, which is an integer. This will lead, as an application in a subsequent paper, to the determination of the K-theory groups K0(C*(M)) of the groupoid C*-algebra of the manifolds with corners M. We also prove that an elliptic operator P on M0 has an invertible perturbation P+R by a lower-order operator if and only if its analytic index vanishes.

Let $G$ be a Lie groupoid over $M$ such that the target-source map from $G$ to $M\times M$ is proper. We show that, if $\mathcal{O}$ is an orbit of finite type (i.e. which admits a proper function with finitely many critical points), then the restriction $G|_\mathcal{U}$ of $G$ to some neighbourhood $\mathcal{U}$ of $\mathcal{O}$ in $M$ is isomorphic to a similar restriction of the action groupoid for the linear action of the transitive groupoid $G|_\mathcal{O}$ on the normal bundle $N\mathcal{O}$. The proof uses a deformation argument based on a cohomology vanishing theorem, along with a slice theorem which is derived from a new result on submersions with a fibre of finite type.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 58H05. Secondary 57R99