Thick morphisms, higher Koszul brackets, and $L_{\infty}$-algebroids

Abstract: It is a classical fact in Poisson geometry that the cotangent bundle of a Poisson manifold has the structure of a Lie algebroid. Manifestations of this structure are the Lichnerowicz differential on multivector fields (calculating Poisson cohomology) and the Koszul bracket of differential forms. "Raising indices" by the Poisson tensor maps the de Rham differential to the Lichnerowicz differential and the Koszul bracket to the Schouten bracket. In this paper, we present a homotopy analog of the above results. When an ordinary Poisson structure is replaced by a homotopy one, instead of a single Koszul bracket there arises an infinite sequence of "higher Koszul brackets" defining an $L_{\infty}$-algebra structure on forms (Khudaverdian--Voronov arXiv:0808.3406). We show how to construct a non-linear transformation, which is an $L_{\infty}$-morphism, from this $L_{\infty}$-algebra to the Lie superalgebra of multivector fields with the canonical Schouten bracket. This is done by using the new notion of "thick morphisms" of supermanifolds recently introduced (see arXiv:1409.6475 and arXiv:1411.6720).