Differential Geometry Working Seminar

Alex Pawelko, University of Waterloo

Gerbes of Coassociative Submanifolds and the first Chern class

We will define (bundle) gerbes, a generalization of principal S^1-bundles, and define connections on gerbes, whose corresponding forms over a trivialization are 2-forms and whose curvatures are 3-forms. Then, we will build a gerbe from coassociative submanifolds of a G_2 manifold, and study its analogue of the first Chern class, an integral cohomology class in degree 3.

MC 5403