On gauge theory and parallel transport in principal 2-bundles over Lie groupoids (2411.00814v1)

Abstract: We investigate an interplay between some ideas in traditional gauge theory and certain concepts in fibered categories. We accomplish this by introducing a notion of a principal Lie 2-group bundle over a Lie groupoid and studying its connection structures, gauge transformations, and parallel transport. We obtain a Lie 2-group torsor version of the one-one correspondence between fibered categories and pseudofunctors. This results in a classification of our principal 2-bundles based on their underlying fibration structures. This allows us to extend a class of our principal 2-bundles to be defined over differentiable stacks presented by the base Lie groupoids. We construct a short exact sequence of VB-groupoids, namely, the 'Atiyah sequence' associated to our principal 2-bundles. Splitting and splitting up to a natural isomorphism of our Atiyah sequence, respectively, gives us notions of 'strict connections' and 'semi-strict connections' on our principal 2-bundles. We describe such connections in terms of Lie 2-algebra valued 1-forms on the total Lie groupoids. The underlying fibration structure of our 2-bundle provides an existence criterion for strict and semi-strict connections. We study the action of the 2-group of gauge transformations on the groupoid of strict and semi-strict connections, and interestingly, we observe an extended symmetry of semi-strict connections. We demonstrate an interrelationship between differential geometric connection-induced horizontal path lifting property in traditional principal bundles' and thecategory theoretic cartesian lifting of morphisms in fibered categories' by developing a theory of connection-induced parallel transport along a particular class of Haefliger paths in the base Lie groupoid of our principle 2-bundles. Finally, we employ our results to introduce a notion of parallel transport along Haefliger paths in the setup of VB-groupoids.