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• CommentRowNumber1.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 8th 2013
• (edited Mar 8th 2013)

We are in the process of finalizing an article on prequantum theory in higher geometry. An early version of our writeup I have now uploaded. It needs a few more cycles of polishing, but I thought I’ll provide this here on the nForum right now as a kind of explanation for the sheer drop in the amount of noise that I have been making around the nLab as of lately ;-:

Regulars here will recognize various things that I/we have been talking about for a good while now. Finally they are materializing in a more pdf-kind of incarnation…

• CommentRowNumber2.
• CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
• CommentTimeMar 8th 2013

Typo:

p. 4

motivation for studying traditonal prequantum geometry.

Flicking to the end, I saw on p. 43

perfectly analogues

and

as discussed abobe

• CommentRowNumber3.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 8th 2013

Thanks, David! Am fixing these now…

• CommentRowNumber4.
• CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
• CommentTimeMar 9th 2013

How is work going on the higher polarization front? Is there likely to be a nice higher geometric account?

• CommentRowNumber5.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 9th 2013

David,

that’s a very good question.

Briefly, we have a bunch of hints and little examples that tell us what various aspects of the story should be. For instance for oo-CS theories induced by oo-Chern-Weil from binary L-oo-invariant polynomials it seems clear what the real higher polarizaitons are and there are low-degree examples that confirms this and give an impression of what the general story will be like, roughly.

Then there is an observation going back to Chris Rogers, which amplifies that of the many equivalent ways to think of polarized sections = quantum states in the traditional theory the one via Bohr-Sommerfeld leaves is the one that has the best chance to abstractly generalize.

But I am still not sure about some details…

• CommentRowNumber6.
• CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
• CommentTimeMar 13th 2013

A trivial typo: in proposition 2.1.2 the Cech nerve has too many arrows between $X \times_Y X \times_Y X$ and $X\times_Y X$.

• CommentRowNumber7.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 13th 2013

Woops. Thanks for catching that! Fixed now.

• CommentRowNumber8.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 15th 2013
• (edited Mar 15th 2013)

As a beginning of a partial reply to David C.s question in #2 I have started to write a note on how to axiomatize in differential cohesion the notion of foliation and of foliation by isotropic submanifolds.

That note is currently at

I have tried to mark it clearly as “Under construction” and if we later find that it should better not be there, I’ll remove it again.

So it seems that isotropic foliations work well in differential cohesion: In the above note I discuss how the ordinary notion of foliation is accurately reproduced when interpreting the differential cohesive axioms in the standard model of synthetic differential infinity-groupoids.

Eventually I should also add discussion that foliations of symplectic groupoids etc. come out as they should. I think this is kind of clear, but I haven’t yet written out any details.

So given isotropic foliations in higher differential cohesion, the next step would seem to be to axiomatize what it means for them to be maximal, hence to be Lagrangian foliations and therefore real polarizations. It seems clear that one should simply consider something like the directed collection of isotropic foliations in differential cohesion and then the extremal ones would be Lagrangian foliations, hence the real polarizations.

At this rough level this seems clear, but I still need to think about how to say this formally in a nice way, and then to check that the expected notions of ordinary Lagrangians, and then of Dirac structures etc. come out correctly.

• CommentRowNumber9.
• CommentAuthorjim_stasheff
• CommentTimeMar 16th 2013
skimming rapidly, I wasn't sure whether you also mention foliation OF coisotropic submanifolds as in firt class constraints
• CommentRowNumber10.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 18th 2013
• (edited Mar 18th 2013)

So what I described is foliations of anything. I guess you are asking if apart from foliation by isotropic submanifolds which I mentioned, this approach also handles foliations by coisotropic submanifolds?

Indeed, this is one motivation for this axiomatization in higher geometry, as follows.

A coisotropic submanifold of a Poisson manifold is equivalently a Lagrangian dg-submanifold of the correspoding Poisson Lie algebroid: the latter is an incarnation of the Poisson manifold in higher geometry as a higher structure which carries not a degree-2 cocycle but a degree 3-cocycle (a 2-plectic structure on an infinitesimal smooth groupoid). The higher analog of Lagrangian foliations of this would correspond to a coisotropic foliation of the original Poisson manifold.

The Dirac structures that I did mention above are the next higher phenomenon in this series of Lagrangian submanifolds/foliations in higher geometry.

• CommentRowNumber11.
• CommentAuthorjim_stasheff
• CommentTimeMar 18th 2013
@So what I described is foliations of anything. I guess you are asking if apart from foliation by isotropic submanifolds which I mentioned, this approach also handles foliations by coisotropic submanifolds?

I was trying to call attention to coisotropic submanifolds determined by first class constraints so they are foliated by the corresponding distribution. Sure, the latter are examples of foliations BY leaves
but having some special properties. I was asking if this was mentioned in your post - whihc I didn't read in details. `Had I but world enough and time...'' I can't red as fast as yu can write!
• CommentRowNumber12.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 18th 2013
• (edited Mar 18th 2013)

Okay, I see what you mean.

Effectively you are asking if in homotopical symplectic reduction (or Poisson reduction) what is described at foliation – in differential cohesive homotopy type theory sees both the restriction to the “shell” as well as the quotient of that by symmetries.

That’s a good point, actually, in that this is an important class of examples to test that axiomatization of foliations against.

I think that, yes, it does come out nicely as follows:

as discussed at differential cohesion in the section differential cohesion – Derived critical locus we can (in that axiomatics) consider:

on a space $X$ an action functional $S \colon X \to \mathbb{G}$ (think $\mathbb{G} = \mathbb{R}$ the multiplicative group of real numbers for simplicity) and then form its critical locus, which is a space canonically equipped with a map to $X$, which in homotopy type theory-notation we may entirely precisely write in the naive fashion as

$\array{ \left\{ x \in X \;| \; \mathbf{d} S_x = 0 \right\} \\ \downarrow \\ X } \,.$

So if $X$ here is just a 0-truncated space (a manifold), then the top guy here is just the locus where $\mathbf{d}S$ vanishes.

But if $S$ is invariant under symmetries on $X$, then we may take $X$ to be the corresponding action groupoid. So then in terms of the groupoidal-discussion at foliation the orbits of $X$ are the leaves of the foliation by symmetries.

Moreover, in this case we may think of the above map as exhibiting the corresponding induced foliation on the critical locus in just the way that I just described in foliation – in differential cohesive homotopy type theory.

In other words, by the discussion there, the foliation OF the critical leaf BY the symmetries that you are asking for would be precisely the decomposition which behind the above link I discuss is presented by the homotopy pullback denoted $Q$ in

$\array{ Q &\to& \left\{ x \in X \;| \; \mathbf{d} S_x = 0 \right\} \\ \downarrow && \downarrow \\ \flat X &\to& X } \,.$

For $X$ an ordinary Lie groupoid, then $Q$ is indeed the disjoint union of the leaves of the critical locus.

• CommentRowNumber13.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeMar 30th 2013
• (edited Mar 30th 2013)

Here is now the pre-arXiv version of the companion article to the above one:

This second article provides the $L_\infty$-algebraic technical statements that are discussed from a more general perspective in the first one Higher geometric prequantum theory (schreiber). But it does not depend on the first one and can be read independently.