Diffeological Coarse Moduli Spaces of Stacks over Manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we consider diffeological spaces as stacks over the site of smooth manifolds, as well as the "underlying" diffeological space of any stack. More precisely, we consider diffeological spaces as so-called concrete sheaves and show that the Grothendieck construction sending these sheaves to stacks has a left adjoint: the functor sending any stack to its diffeological coarse moduli space. As an application, we restrict our attention to differentiable stacks and examine the geometry behind the coarse moduli space construction in terms of Lie groupoids and their principal bundles. Within this context, we define a "gerbe", and show when a Lie groupoid is such a gerbe (or when a stack is represented by one). Additionally, we define basic differential forms for stacks and confirm in the differentiable case that these agree (under certain conditions) with basic differential forms on a representative Lie groupoid. These basic differentiable forms in turn match the diffeological forms on the orbit space.