English

Connections on central extensions, lifting gerbes, and finite-dimensional obstruction vanishing

Differential Geometry 2019-11-21 v2

Abstract

Given a central extension of Lie groups, we study the classification problem of lifting the structure group together with a given connection. For reductive structure groups we introduce a new connective structure on the lifting gerbe associated to this problem. Our main result classifies all connections on the central extension of a given principal bundle. In particular, we find that admissible connections are in one-to-one correspondence with parallel trivializations of the lifting gerbe. Moreover, we prove a vanishing result for Neeb's obstruction classes for finite-dimensional Lie groups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.10402,
  title  = {Connections on central extensions, lifting gerbes, and finite-dimensional obstruction vanishing},
  author = {Indranil Biswas and Markus Upmeier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.10402},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

16 pages. Final version, to appear in the Geometry at the Frontier conference proceedings