Etale bundles and sheaves

Question

I am now going through Isham's book Modern differential geometry for physicists and got stuck with the notions of etale bundle, presheaf and sheaf. Could someone please suggest some other, more intuitive and more accessible references on etale bundles and sheaves, preferably the ones giving more motivation and sufficiently many explicit (and worked-out) examples and, preferably, accessible to theoretical physicists (i.e., not just mathematicians)?

P.S. To make things clear, a few math texts I have managed to find so far like Godement's and Bredon's Sheaf Theory (two books with the same title) seem way too tough for me. The part on sheaves in Arapura's Algebraic Geometry over Complex Numbers is somewhat better but still a bit too fast going and with too few examples and not too much motivation. Pretty much the same applies to the part on sheaves (which is too brief anyway) in the Clay Institute volume Mirror Symmetry. If there are no suitable books, are there perhaps some good lecture notes on the subject accessible to physicists rather than just mathematicians, from which one get a reasonable intuition on sheaves and stuff?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-30 15:28 (UCT), posted by SE-user just-learning

Comments

Why have you removed the "intuitive" part? You state in the question that you want an intuitive resource.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-30 15:28 (UCT), posted by SE-user Dimensio1n0

Answer 1

Here is a motivation for the general notion of sheaf and sheaf cohomology:

• motivation for sheaves, cohomology and higher stacks

A general introduction to differential geometry as needed in physics in terms of sheaves is at

• geometry of physics in the section on smooth spaces.

More along these lines is in section 1.2 of arXiv:1310.7930, which describes physics in terms of sheaves (and higher sheaves) on smooth manifolds (and variants thereof).

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-30 15:28 (UCT), posted by SE-user Urs Schreiber

Comments

+1 I'm sure this joke has been made before but what a truly awesome schreiber you are to have put together your contibutions to the nLab! What a wonderful project!

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-30 15:28 (UCT), posted by SE-user WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance