Related papers: Surface holonomy and gauge 2-group
We develop parallel transport on path spaces from a differential geometric approach, whose integral version connects with the category theoretic approach. In the framework of 2-connections, our approach leads to further development of…
We introduce an axiomatic framework for the parallel transport of connections on gerbes. It incorporates parallel transport along curves and along surfaces, and is formulated in terms of gluing axioms and smoothness conditions. The…
A nice differential-geometric framework for (non-abelian) higher gauge theory is provided by principal 2-bundles, i.e. categorified principal bundles. Their total spaces are Lie groupoids, local trivializations are kinds of Morita…
Holonomy invariants in strict higher gauge theory have been studied in depth, aiming to applications to higher Chern-Simons theory. For a flat 2-connection, the holonomy of surface knots of arbitrary genus has been defined and its…
We introduce a nonabelian surface holonomy that is constructed from a one-form gauge potential that takes values in a loop algebra of the $U(N)$ gauge group. The surface holonomy parallel transports a nonabelian string. Although it is not…
Parallel transport, or path development, provides a rich characterization of paths which preserves the underlying algebraic structure of concatenation. The path signature is universal among such maps: any (translation-invariant) parallel…
There are few known computable examples of non-abelian surface holonomy. In this paper, we give several examples whose structure 2-groups are covering 2-groups and show that the surface holonomies can be computed via a simple formula in…
We introduce horizontal holonomy groups, which are groups defined using parallel transport only along curves tangent to a given subbundle $D$ of the tangent bundle. We provide explicit means of computing these holonomy groups by deriving…
Hermitian bundle gerbes with connection are geometric objects for which a notion of surface holonomy can be defined for closed oriented surfaces. We systematically introduce bundle gerbes by closing the pre-stack of trivial bundle gerbes…
This is the first of a series of two technical papers devoted to the analysis of holonomy invariants in strict higher gauge theory with end applications in higher Chern--Simons theory. For a flat 2--connection, we define the 2-holonomy of…
We characterize the representations of the fundamental group of a closed surface to $\mathrm{PSL}_2(\mathbb C)$ that arise as the holonomy of a branched complex projective structure with fixed branch divisor. In particular, we compute the…
Just as gauge theory describes the parallel transport of point particles using connections on bundles, higher gauge theory describes the parallel transport of 1-dimensional objects (e.g. strings) using 2-connections on 2-bundles. A 2-bundle…
We compare two different constructions of higher dimensional parallel transport. On the one hand, there is the two dimensional parallel transport associated to 2-connections on 2-bundles studied by Baez-Schreiber, Faria Martins-Picken and…
We provide a visual and intuitive introduction to effectively calculating in 2-groups along with explicit examples coming from non-abelian 1- and 2-form gauge theory. In particular, we utilize string diagrams, tools similar to tensor…
This paper is motivated by recent developments of higher gauge theory. Different from its style of using higher category theory, we try to describe the concept of higher parallel transport within setting of classical principal bundle…
In the present note we describe geometrically the homology classes in the total space of a surface bundle over a surface in terms of the holonomy map. We treat the cases where the base surface is closed or has one boundary component. We…
Usually bundle gerbes are considered as objects of a 2-groupoid, whose 1-morphisms, called stable isomorphisms, are all invertible. I introduce new 1-morphisms which include stable isomorphisms, trivializations and bundle gerbe modules.…
A notion of dual curve for pseudoholomorphic curves in 4--manifolds turns out to be possible only if the notion of almost complex structure structure is slightly generalized. The resulting structure is as easy (perhaps easier) to work with,…
As an example of the categorical apparatus of pseudo algebras over 2-theories, we show that pseudo algebras over the 2-theory of categories can be viewed as pseudo double categories with folding or as appropriate 2-functors into…
The motivation for this paper stems \cite{CR} from the need to construct explicit isomorphisms of (possibly nontrivial) principal $G$-bundles on the space of loops or, more generally, of paths in some manifold $M$, over which I consider a…