I came across this paper by Horava (hep-th/9404101) where he discusses Chern-Simons theory on an orbifold. The upshot is that one needs to account for the orbifold singularities by inserting Wilson lines in a particular way and computing on the underlying topological space. This seems like a curious result to me, since I would expect a TQFT, such as CS, to not care about the orbifold singularities. There is a de Rham theorem for orbifolds where indeed the orbifold singularities do not survive. So my question is twofold. First, what’s the reason why CS is actually sensitive to orbifold singularities? And more broadly, how should one really deal with gauge theory on orbifolds, especially about the singularities? I don’t know if there hasn’t been much work on concrete examples or whether it is scarce and buried in the (sort of unrelated) orbifold as a target space literature.
]]>With Alessandro Valentino we have now written a short note on anomalous tqfts and projective representations. In case you’d like to have a preview of it before we post it to the arXiv, any suggestion, comment or criticism is welcome.
]]>Here is where I’ll blog my redaing of Topological Quantum Field Theories from Compact Lie Groups
day 1. quickly read the intro and gone directly to section1. main statement there is proposition 1.2, identifying with the group of abelian characters . in nLab we have a nice understanding of this identification as follows: the set of abelian characters is the set of cocycles , and the above identification follows by the long fibration sequence of oo-Lie groupoids
The description of the tqft associated with is given explicitely. Apparently it can be interpreted as follows: the vector space associated to a point is the space of sections of the line bundle on the groupoid induced by the cocycle (this space of sections will be - or -dimensional depending whether is the trivial cocycle or not). The complex number associated to is the dimension of this vector space. This can be seen as the integral over of the morphism induced by .
That is related this way to the space of maps from to and to the cocycle seems to be what is really crucial here. Yet in section 1 no deep reason for this being “the right answer” is given at this level and it is only remarked that the above described interpretation of is possible.
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