Vector Hulls of Affine Spaces and Affine Bundles

Every affine space A can be canonically immersed as a hyperplane into a vector space  , which is called the vector hull of A. This immersion satisfies a universal property for affine functions defined on A. In the same way, every affine map between affine spaces has a linear prolongation to their vector hulls. Though not much known, this construction is greatly clarifying, both for affine geometry and for its applications. The goal of this paper is to perform a thorough study of the vector hull functor and to describe its counterpart in the framework of affine bundles. With this respect, it is shown that the vector hull of some interesting affine bundles, and more specifically some jet bundles, can be identified with certain vector bundles.