The first goal of this survey paper is to argue that if orbifolds are groupoids, then the collection of orbifolds and their maps has to be thought of as a 2-category. Compare this with the classical definition of Satake and Thurston of orbifolds as a 1-category of sets with extra structure and/or with the "modern" definition of orbifolds as proper etale Lie groupoids up to Morita equivalence.
The second goal is to describe two complementary ways of thinking of orbifolds as a 2-category:
1. the weak 2-category of foliation Lie groupoids, bibundles and equivariant maps between bibundles and
2. the strict 2-category of Deligne-Mumford stacks over the category of smooth manifolds.
Presentations of smooth symmetry groups of differentiable stacks are studied within the framework of the weak 2-category of Lie groupoids, smooth principal bibundles, and smooth biequivariant maps. It is shown that principality of bibundles is a categorical property which is sufficient and necessary for the existence of products. Stacky Lie groups are defined as group objects in this weak 2-category. Introducing a graphic notation, it is shown that for every stacky Lie monoid there is a natural morphism, called the preinverse, which is a Morita equivalence if and only if the monoid is a stacky…
Quasifolds are spaces that are locally modelled by quotients of $\mathbb{R}^n$ by countable affine group actions. These spaces first appeared in Elisa Prato's generalization of the Delzant construction, and special cases include leaf spaces of irrational linear flows on the torus, and orbifolds. We consider the category of diffeological quasifolds, which embeds in the category of diffeological spaces, and the bicategory of quasifold groupoids, which embeds in the bicategory of Lie groupoids, bibundles, and bibundle morphisms. We prove that, restricting to those morphisms that are locally inver…
This is the writeup of a lecture given at the May Wisconsin workshop on mathematical aspects of orbifold string theory. In the first part of this lecture, we review recent work on discrete torsion, and outline how it is currently understood in terms of the B field. In the second part of this lecture, we discuss the relationship between quotient stacks and string orbifolds.
For a compact manifold M and a differentiable stack \cX presented by a Lie groupoid X, we show the Hom-stack Hom(M,\cX) is presented by a Fréchet-Lie groupoid Map(M,X) and so is an infinite-dimensional differentiable stack. We further show that if \cX is an orbifold, presented by a proper étale Lie groupoid, then Map(M,X) is proper étale and so presents an infinite-dimensional orbifold.
We develop a universal framework to study smooth higher orbifolds on the one hand and higher Deligne-Mumford stacks (as well as their derived and spectral variants) on the other, and use this framework to obtain a completely categorical description of which stacks arise as the functor of points of such objects. We choose to model higher orbifolds and Deligne-Mumford stacks as infinity-topoi equipped with a structure sheaf, thus naturally generalizing the work of Lurie, but our approach applies not only to different settings of algebraic geometry such as classical algebraic geometry, derived al…
We generalize the notion of a small sheaf of sets over a topological space or manifold to define the notion of a small stack of groupoids over an étale topological or differentiable stack. We then provide a construction analogous to the étalé space construction in this context, establishing an equivalence of 2-categories between small stacks over an étale stack and local homeomorphisms over it. We go on to characterize small sheaves and gerbes. We show that ineffective data of étale stacks is completely described by the theory of small gerbes. Furthermore, it is shown that étale stacks (and in…
In this work we introduce the category of multiplicative sections of an $\la$-groupoid. We prove that this category carries natural strict Lie 2-algebra structures, which are Morita invariant. As applications, we study the algebraic structure underlying multiplicative vector fields on a Lie groupoid and in particular vector fields on differentiable stacks. We also introduce the notion of geometric vector field on the quotient stack of a Lie groupoid, showing that the space of such vector fields is a Lie algebra. We describe the Lie algebra of geometric vector fields in several cases, including…
This is a concise introduction to the theory of Lie groupoids, with emphasis in their role as models for stacks. After some preliminaries, we review the foundations on Lie groupoids, and we carefully study equivalences and proper groupoids. Differentiable stacks are geometric objects which have manifolds and orbifolds as special instances, and can be presented as the transverse geometry of a Lie groupoid. Two Lie groupoids are equivalent if they are presenting the same stack, and proper groupoids are presentations of separated stacks, which by the linearization theorem are locally modeled by l…
We describe various equivalent ways of associating to an orbifold, or more generally a higher étale differentiable stack, a weak homotopy type. Some of these ways extend to arbitrary higher stacks on the site of smooth manifolds, and we show that for a differentiable stack X arising from a Lie groupoid G, the weak homotopy type of X agrees with that of BG. Using this machinery, we are able to find new presentations for the weak homotopy type of certain classifying spaces. In particular, we give a new presentation for the Borel construction of an almost free action of a Lie group G on a smooth …
We describe a bicategory $(\mathcal{R}ed\,\mathcal{O}rb)$ of reduced orbifolds in the framework of classical differential geometry (i.e. without any explicit reference to notions of Lie groupoids or differentiable stacks, but only using orbifold atlases, local lifts and changes of charts). In order to construct such a bicategory, we first define a $2$-category $(\mathcal{R}ed\,\mathcal{A}tl)$ whose objects are reduced orbifold atlases (on any paracompact, second countable, Hausdorff topological space). The definition of morphisms is obtained as a slight modification of a definition by A. Pohl,…
We extend the notion of the cardinality of a discrete groupoid (equal to the Euler characteristic of the corresponding discrete orbifold) to the setting of Lie groupoids. Since this quantity is an invariant under equivalence of groupoids, we call it the volume of the associated stack rather than of the groupoid itself. Since there is no natural measure in the smooth case like the counting measure in the discrete case, we need extra data to define the volume. This data has the form of an invariant section of a natural line bundle over the groupoid. Sections of a square root of this line bundle …
Motivated by an attempt to better understand the notion of a symplectic stack, we introduce the notion of a symplectic hopfoid, which should be thought of as the analog of a groupoid in the so-called symplectic category. After reviewing some foundational material on canonical relations and this category, we show that symplectic hopfoids provide a characterization of symplectic double groupoids in these terms. Then, we show how such structures may be used to produce examples of symplectic orbifolds, and conjecture that all symplectic orbifolds arise via a similar construction. The symplectic st…
An arbitrary Lie groupoid gives rise to a groupoid of germs of local diffeomorphisms over its base manifold, known as its effect. The effect of any bundle of Lie groups is trivial. All quotients of a given Lie groupoid determine the same effect. It is natural to regard the effects of any two Morita equivalent Lie groupoids as being equivalent. In this paper we shall describe a systematic way of comparing the effects of different Lie groupoids. In particular, we shall rigorously define what it means for two arbitrary Lie groupoids to give rise to equivalent effects. For effective orbifold group…
