Previous |  Up |  Next

Article

Keywords:
higher connections; higher parallel transport; generalised Atiyah groupoid; generalised Atiyah sequence; orthogonal factorisation systems
Summary:
This is a condensed report from the ongoing project aimed on higher principal connections and their relation with higher differential cohomology theories and generalised short exact sequences of $L_\infty $ algebroids. A historical stem for our project is a paper from sir M. Atiyah who observed a bijective correspondence between data for a horizontal distribution on a fibre bundle and a set of sections for a certain splitting short exact sequence of Lie algebroids, nowadays called the Atiyah sequence. In a meantime there was developed quite firm understanding of the category theory and in the last two decades also the higher category/topos theory. This conceptual framework allows us to examine principal connections and higher principal connections in a prism of differential cohomology theories. In this text we cover mostly the motivational part of the project which resides in searching for a common language of these two successful approaches to connections. From the reasons of conciseness and compactness we have not included computations and several lengthy proofs.
References:
[1] Atiyah, M.F.: Complex analytic connections in fibre bundles. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 85 (1957), no. 1, 181–207. DOI 10.1090/S0002-9947-1957-0086359-5 | MR 0086359
[2] Berwick-Evans, D., de Brito, P.B., Pavlov, D.: Classifying spaces of infinity-sheaves. 2019. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.1912.10544 DOI 10.48550/ARXIV.1912.10544
[3] Dwyer, W.G., Spalinski, J.: Homotopy theories and model categories. Handbook of algebraic topology 73 (1995), 126. MR 1361887
[4] Fiorenza, D., Rogers, C.L., Schreiber, U.: Higher U(1)-gerbe connections in geometric prequantization. Rev. Math. Phys. 28 (2016), no. 06, 1650012. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/s0129055x16500124 DOI 10.1142/S0129055X16500124 | MR 3535115
[5] Friedman, G.: Survey article: an elementary illustrated introduction to simplicial sets. Rocky Mountain J. Math. (2012), 353–423. MR 2915498
Partner of
EuDML logo