Regular Cartan groupoids and longitudinal representations

Abstract: With the intent of laying the groundwork for a program that aims at explicitly describing the space of Cartan (i.e. multiplicative) connections on a general proper Lie groupoid, we begin to investigate the space of such connections in the regular case. We point out that there is a close relationship between Cartan connections on a proper regular groupoid and representations of the groupoid on its own longitudinal bundle (i.e. on the vector distribution tangent to its orbits). This observation enables us to reduce the original problem to a simpler one. We carry out a prospective study of the latter problem, and apply the resulting analysis to produce a number of examples in rank two which serve to illustrate the diversity of the possible obstructions to the existence of multiplicative connections.