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July 20, 2012

Extended higher Chern-Simons theories

Posted by Urs Schreiber

We have been busy working on a little article. Now we feel it is time to show our current version around, before doing some last polishing and then posting it to the arXiv:

  • Domenico Fiorenza, Hisham Sati, Urs Schreiber,

    Extended higher cup-product Chern-Simons theories

    (pdf, web)

Check out section 1 Introduction and overview, for the story (6 pages). The rest is details.

I am grateful to the organizers of String-Math 2012 for providing an environment in which this was finalized.

Abstract. It is well known that the proper action functional of (4k+3)-dimensional U(1)-Chern-Simons theory including the instanton sectors is given on gauge equivalence classes of higher gauge fields by the fiber integration of the cup product square of classes in degree-(2k+2)(2k+2) differential cohomology.

We first refine this statement from gauge equivalence classes to the full higher smooth moduli stack of fields, to which the higher-order-ghost BRST complex is the infinitesimal approximation. Then we generalize the refined formulation to cup product Chern-Simons theories of nonabelian and higher nonabelian gauge fields, such as the nonabelian String-2-connections appearing in quantum-corrected 11-dimensional supergravity and on M-branes.

We discuss aspects of the off-shell extended geometric quantization (in the sense of extended or multi-tiered QFT) of these theories, with prequantum circle k-bundles (equivalently: (k−1)(k\!-\!1)-bundle gerbes) in each codimension kk.

Examples we include differential T-duality structures as well as the anomaly line bundles of higher electric/magnetic charges, such as the 5-brane charges appearing in heterotic supergravity, as line bundles with connection on the smooth higher moduli stacks field configurations.

Posted at July 20, 2012 8:55 PM UTC

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2 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: Extended higher Chern-Simons theories

Typos on p. 2

…such that these assignmens…

The formal langauge…

Posted by: David Corfield on August 9, 2012 7:17 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Extended higher Chern-Simons theories

Typos on p. 2

Thanks for spotting these! I have fixed them now in our local copy. (These and other fixes will appear in the next arXiv version.)

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on August 12, 2012 5:18 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

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