The aim of this paper is to define and study the 3-category of extensions of
Picard 2-stacks over a site S and to furnish a geometrical description of the
cohomology groups Ext^i of length 3 complexes of abelian sheaves. More
precisely, our main Theorem furnishes
(1) a parametrization of the equivalence classes of objects, 1-arrows,
2-arrows, and 3-arrows of the 3-category of extensions of Picard 2-stacks by
the cohomology groups Ext^i, and
(2) a geometrical description of the cohomology groups Ext^i of length 3
complexes of abelian sheaves via extensions of Picard 2-stacks.
To this end, we use the triequivalence between the 3-category of Picard
2-stacks and the tricategory T^[-2,0](S) of length 3 complexes of abelian
sheaves over S introduced by the second author in arXiv:0906.2393, and we
define the notion of extension in this tricategory T^[-2,0](S), getting a pure
algebraic analogue of the 3-category of extensions of Picard 2-stacks. The
calculus of fractions that we use to define extensions in the tricategory
T^[-2,0](S) plays a central role in the proof of our Main Theorem.Comment: 2 New Appendix: in the first Appendix we compute a long exact
sequence involving the homotopy groups of an extension of Picard 2-stacks,
and in the second Appendix we sketch the proof that the fibered sum of Picard
2-stacks satisfies the universal propert
