Smooth Functors vs. Differential Forms

Understand

We establish a relation between smooth 2-functors defined on the path 2-groupoid of a smooth manifold and differential forms on this manifold.

• This relation can be understood as a part of a dictionary between fundamental notions from category theory and differential geometry.
• We show that smooth 2-functors appear in several fields, namely as connections on (non-abelian) gerbes, as curvatures of smooth functors and as critical points in BF theory.
• We demonstrate further that our dictionary provides a powerful tool to discuss the transgression of geometric objects to loop spaces.