The correspondence between Poisson structures and symplectic groupoids,
analogous to the one of Lie algebras and Lie groups, plays an important role in
Poisson geometry; it offers, in particular, a unifying framework for the study
of hamiltonian and Poisson actions. In this paper, we extend this
correspondence to the context of Dirac structures twisted by a closed 3-form.
More generally, given a Lie groupoid G over a manifold M, we show that
multiplicative 2-forms on G relatively closed with respect to a closed 3-form
Ο on M correspond to maps from the Lie algebroid of G into the
cotangent bundle TβM of M, satisfying an algebraic condition and a
differential condition with respect to the Ο-twisted Courant bracket. This
correspondence describes, as a special case, the global objects associated to
twisted Dirac structures. As applications, we relate our results to equivariant
cohomology and foliation theory, and we give a new description of
quasi-hamiltonian spaces and group-valued momentum maps.Comment: 42 pages. Minor changes, typos corrected. Revised version to appear
in Duke Math.