Introduction
In general, given a subbundle
of a fiber bundle
over
and a vector field
on
, its restriction
to
is a vector field "along"
not on (i.e., tangent to)
. If one denotes by
the canonical embedding, then
is a section of the pullback bundle
, where

and
is the tangent bundle of the fiber bundle
. Let us assume that we are given a Kosmann decomposition of the pullback bundle
, such that

i.e., at each
one has
where
is a vector subspace of
and we assume
to be a vector bundle over
, called the transversal bundle of the Kosmann decomposition. It follows that the restriction
to
splits into a tangent vector field
on
and a transverse vector field
being a section of the vector bundle 
Definition
Let
be the oriented orthonormal frame bundle of an oriented
-dimensional Riemannian manifold
with given metric
. This is a principal
-subbundle of
, the tangent frame bundle of linear frames over
with structure group
. By definition, one may say that we are given with a classical reductive
-structure. The special orthogonal group
is a reductive Lie subgroup of
. In fact, there exists a direct sum decomposition
, where
is the Lie algebra of
,
is the Lie algebra of
, and
is the
-invariant vector subspace of symmetric matrices, i.e.
for all 
Let
be the canonical embedding.
One then can prove that there exists a canonical Kosmann decomposition of the pullback bundle
such that

i.e., at each
one has 
being the fiber over
of the subbundle
of
. Here,
is the vertical subbundle of
and at each
the fiber
is isomorphic to the vector space of symmetric matrices
.
From the above canonical and equivariant decomposition, it follows that the restriction
of an
-invariant vector field
on
to
splits into a
-invariant vector field
on
, called the Kosmann vector field associated with
, and a transverse vector field
.
In particular, for a generic vector field
on the base manifold
, it follows that the restriction
to
of its natural lift
onto
splits into a
-invariant vector field
on
, called the Kosmann lift of
, and a transverse vector field
.