Holonomy and parallel transport for Abelian gerbes

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between U(1)-gerbes with connections, on the one hand, and their holonomies, for simply connected manifolds, or their parallel transports, in the general case, on the other hand. This result is a higher-order analogue of the familiar equivalence between bundles with connections and their holonomies for connected manifolds. The holonomy of a gerbe with group U(1) on a simply connected manifold M is a group morphism from the thin second homotopy group to U(1), satisfying a smoothness condition, where a homotopy between maps from [0,1](2) to M is thin when its derivative is of rank less than or equal to2. For the non-simply connected case, holonomy is replaced by a parallel transport functor between two special Lie groupoids, which we call Lie 2-groups. The reconstruction of the gerbe and connection from its holonomy is carried out in detail for the simply connected case. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).Programa Operacional ‘‘Ciencia # , Tecnologia, Inovacao* ’’ (POCTI) of the Fundacao para a Ci * encia e a Tecnologia # (FCT), cofinanced by the European Community fund FEDE