| | Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » Langlands Program and Physics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22) |
 | | The ${SL}(2,Z)$ symmetry of abelian YM follows (at least classically obviously) from realizing it as a toroidal compactification of the theory of an abelian 2-form with self-dual field strength in six dimensions, where the ${SL}(2,Z)$ is just the modular group of the internal torus. |
 | | The existence of that nonabelian 2-holonomy seems to be, apart from the self-duality of $H$, a further important condition on whatever Witten may mean by nonabelian gerbe field theory: |
 | | Therefore, in order to understand nonabelian theories in 6D (and, incidentally, the general configuration of the fundamental objects of M-theory) it would be very helpful to have a notion of nonabelian surface holonomy ${hol}_{\partial V}(B)$ that makes the above expression well-defined. |
| www.math.columbia.edu /~woit/blog/archives/000122.html (4262 words) |