Related papers: Connecting Through Obstruction; Relating Gauge Gra…
We start by briefly reviewing the description of gravity theories as gauge theories in four dimensions. More specifically we recall the procedure leading to the results of General Relativity and Weyl Gravity in a gauge-theoretic manner.…
How to include spacetime translations in fibre bundle gauge theories has been a subject of controversy, because spacetime symmetries are not internal symmetries of the bundle structure group. The standard method for including affine…
We first review the notion of a $G_2$-manifold, defined in terms of a principal $G_2$ ("gauge") bundle over a $7$-dimensional manifold, before discussing their relation to supergravity. In a second thread, we focus on associative…
The past few years have witnessed a remarkable crossover of string theoretical ideas from the abstract world of geometrical forms to the concrete experimental realm of condensed matter physics. The basis for this --- variously known as…
Geometric structures on manifolds became popular when Thurston used them in his work on the geometrization conjecture. They were studied by many people and they play an important role in higher Teichm\"uller theory. Geometric structures on…
In this paper we show that there exists a new class of topological field theories, whose correlators are intersection numbers of cohomology classes in a constrained moduli space. Our specific example is a formulation of 2D topological…
We argue that a consistent coupling of a quantum theory to gravity requires an extension of ordinary `first order' Riemannian geometry to second order Riemannian geometry, which incorporates both a line element and an area element. This…
The duality cascade, and its dual description as string theory on the warped deformed conifold, brings together several sophisticated topics, some of which are not widely known. These lectures, which contain a number of previously…
We conjecture a general upper bound on the strength of gravity relative to gauge forces in quantum gravity. This implies, in particular, that in a four-dimensional theory with gravity and a U(1) gauge field with gauge coupling g, there is a…
We systematically analyze a broad class of dual heterotic and F-theory models that give four-dimensional supergravity theories, and compare the geometric constraints on the two sides of the duality. Specifically, we give a complete…
We propose a gauge theory of gravitation. The gauge potential is a connection of the Super SL(2,C) group. A MacDowell-Mansouri type of action is proposed where the action is quadratic in the Super SL(2,C) curvature and depends purely on…
We present variational formulations of gauge theories and Einstein--Yang-Mills equations in the spirit of Kaluza-Klein theories. For gaugetheories, only a topological fibration is assumed. For gravitation coupled with gauge fields, no…
Many bundle gerbes constructed in practice are either infinite-dimensional, or finite-dimensional but built using submersions that are far from being fibre bundles. Murray and Stevenson proved that gerbes on simply-connected manifolds,…
We review and then combine two aspects of the theory of bundle gerbes. The first concerns lifting bundle gerbes and connections on those, developed by Murray and Gomi. Lifting gerbes represent obstructions against extending the structure…
General relativity is a deterministic theory with non-fixed causal structure. Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. In this paper we build a framework for probabilistic theories with non-fixed causal…
This thesis analyses gauged supergravities in various dimensions and their possible origin from compactifications of string theory. In the effective description the fluxes appear in the theory as deformation parameters generating a…
In this paper connections between different gauge-theoretical problems in high and low dimensions are established. In particular it is shown that higher dimensional asd equations on total spaces of spinor bundles over low dimensional…
When joined the unified gauge picture of fundamental interactions, the gravitation theory leads to geometry of a space-time which is far from simplicity of pseudo-Riemannian geometry of Einstein's General Relativity. This is geometry of the…
I introduce a way of constructing a fiber bundle whose fibers are given by hypercomplex algebras and woven by appropriate structure group, and present that a novel gauge theory can be built on the hypercomplex fiber bundle. In this work, I…
The history of the geometry of Double Field Theory is the history of string theorists' effort to tame higher geometric structures. In this spirit, the first part of this paper will contain a brief overview on the literature of geometry of…