Twisted-Product Categorical Bundles

Abstract: Categorical bundles provide a natural framework for gauge theories involving multiple gauge groups. Unlike the case of traditional bundles there are distinct notions of triviality, and hence also of local triviality, for categorical bundles. We study categorical principal bundles that are product bundles in the categorical sense, developing the relationship between functorial sections of such bundles and trivializations. We construct functorial cocycles with values in categorical groups using a suitable family of locally defined functions on the object space of the base category. Categorical product bundles being too rigid to give a widely applicable model for local triviality, we introduce the notion of a twisted-product categorical bundle. We relate such bundles to decorated categorical bundles that contain more information, specifically parallel transport data.