The stringor bundle

Abstract

We set up a framework of 2-Hilbert bundles, which allows to rigorously define the "stringor bundle", a higher differential geometric object anticipated by Stolz and Teichner in an unpublished preprint about 20 years ago. Our framework includes an associated bundle construction, allowing us to associate a 2-Hilbert bundle with a principal 2-bundle and a unitary representation of its structure 2-group. We prove that the Stolz-Teichner stringor bundle is canonically isomorphic to the 2-Hilbert bundle obtained from applying our associated bundle construction to a string structure on a manifold and the stringor representation of the string 2-group that we discovered in earlier work. This establishes a perfect analogy to spin manifolds, representations of the spin groups, and spinor bundles.