Université Lyon 1,
Bât. Braconnier,
21 av. Claude Bernard,
69100 Villeurbanne
Description
The Wess-Zumino-Witten model is a sigma model with target a Lie group. It is controlled by a "higher bundle" that exists on any compact simple Lie group, called the "basic gerbe". The first half of our talk will be a friendly summary of these ideas, which are due to Gawedzki and various collaborators. In the second half, we give a progress report on our work generalizing gerbes to the context of supermanifolds.