Jacobi structures and Spencer operators

Abstract: This paper explains the fundamental relation between Jacobi structures and the classical Spencer operator coming from the theory of PDEs so as to provide a direct and geometric approach to the integrability of Jacobi structures. It uses recent results on the integrability of Spencer operators and multliplicative forms on Lie groupoids with non-trivial coefficients. In Theorem 1 we show that the Spencer operator associated to a contact groupoid reveals that the base manifold carries a Jacobi structure. Theorem 2 deals with the problem of integrating Jacobi structures to contact groupoids.