Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,047 questions , 2,200 unanswered
5,345 answers , 22,709 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
816 active unimported users
More ...

  How are symplectic forms used in string theory?

+ 1 like - 0 dislike
479 views

Sämann and Szabo in "Groupoids, Loop Spaces and Quantization of 2-Plectic Manifolds" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.0395.pdf) show that one can transgress a 2-plectic form on some manifold to a symplectic form on the knot space, which is (a restriction of) "the configuration space of a bosonic string sigma-model on $S^1 \times \mathbb{R}$ with target space $M$."

Szabo in another article (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.05673.pdf) writes that "In higher geometry it is well-known that the nonassociativity features of a gerbe on M can be traded for more conventional noncommutative features of a line bundle on the loop space... [the mapping] has a natural interpretation of trading particle degrees of freedom for closed string degrees of freedom"

I have no background in string theory, so I am not sure how transgression techniques are used from a physics standpoint: When one transgresses a 2-plectic (or n-plectic) form to a symplectic (or (n-1)-plectic) form on loop/knot space, what significance does the latter form have in string theory? How is it used?

Any references on the topic are welcome.

asked May 16, 2021 in Theoretical Physics by Quantumnessie (90 points) [ no revision ]

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsOverf$\varnothing$ow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...