Related papers: Orbispaces and their Mapping Spaces via Groupoids:…

``An orbifold is a space which is locally modeled on the quotient of a vector space by a finite group.'' This sentence is so easily said or written that more than one person has missed some of the subtleties hidden by orbifolds. Orbifolds…

This is a survey paper based on my talk at the Workshop on Orbifolds and String Theory, the goal of which was to explain the role of groupoids and their classifying spaces as a foundation for the theory of orbifolds.

In recent years a lot of attention has been paid to topological spaces which are a bit more general than smooth manifolds - orbifolds. Orbifolds are intuitively speaking manifolds with some singularities. The formal definition is also…

Orbifold groupoids have been recently widely used to represent both effective and ineffective orbifolds. We show that every orbifold groupoid can be faithfully represented on a continuous family of finite dimensional Hilbert spaces. As a…

The first goal of this survey paper is to argue that if orbifolds are groupoids, then the collection of orbifolds and their maps has to be thought of as a 2-category. Compare this with the classical definition of Satake and Thurston of…

An orbifold is a Morita equivalence class of a proper {\' e}tale Lie groupoid. A unitary equivalence class of spectral triples over the algebra of smooth invariant functions are associated with any compact spin orbifold. In the case of an…

It is well-known that reduced smooth orbifolds and proper effective foliation Lie groupoids form equivalent categories. However, for certain recent lines of research, equivalence of categories is not sufficient. We propose a notion of maps…

We build a concrete and natural model for the strict 2-category of orbifolds. In particular we prove that if one localizes the 2-category of proper etale Lie groupoids at a class of 1-arrows that we call "covers", then the strict 2-category…

An orbifold is a topological space modeled on quotient spaces of a finite group actions. We can define the universal cover of an orbifold and the fundamental group as the deck transformation group. Let $G$ be a Lie group acting on a space…

We propose a notion of 1-homotopy for generalized maps. This notion generalizes those of natural transformation and ordinary homotopy for functors. The 1-homotopy type of a Lie groupoid is shown to be invariant under Morita equivalence. As…

Starting with some motivating examples (classical atlases for a manifold, space of leaves of a foliation, group orbits), we propose to view a Lie groupoid as a generalized atlas for the "virtual structure" of its orbit space, the…

We present some features of the smooth structure, and of the canonical stratification on the orbit space of a proper Lie groupoid. One of the main features is that of Morita invariance of these structures - it allows us to talk about the…

Informally, an orbifold is a smooth space whose points may have finitely many internal symmetries. Formally, however, the notion of orbifold has been presented in a number of different guises -- from Satake's V-manifolds to Moerdijk and…

We propose a new homotopy invariant for Lie groupoids which generalizes the classical Lusternik-Schnirelmann category for topological spaces. We use a bicategorical approach to develop a notion of contraction in this context. We propose a…

The paper gives a categorical approach to generalized manifolds such as orbit spaces and leaf spaces of foliations. It is suggested to consider these spaces as sets equipped with some additional structure which generalizes the notion of…

The purpose of this thesis is to use the language of orbifold groupoids to describe the geometry and topology of orbifolds, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of this language as they arise.

We define orbifold mapping class groups (with marked points) and study them using their action on certain orbifold analogs of arcs and simple closed curves. Moreover, we establish a Birman exact sequence for suitable subgroups of orbifold…

A Lie groupoid can be thought of as a generalization of a Lie group in which the multiplication is only defined for certain pairs of elements. From another perspective, Lie groupoids can be regarded as manifolds endowed with a type of…

We define a 2-category structure (Pre-Orb) on the category of reduced complex orbifold atlases. We construct a 2-functor F from (Pre-Orb) to the 2-category (Grp) of proper \'etale effective groupoid objects over the complex manifolds. Both…

Given a Lie groupoid, we can form its orbit space, which carries a natural diffeology. More generally, we have a quotient functor from the Hilsum-Skandalis category of Lie groupoids to the category of diffeological spaces. We introduce the…