Non-abelian higher gauge theory and categorical bundle

A gauge theory is associated with a principal bundle endowed with a connection permitting to define horizontal lifts of paths. The horizontal lifts of surfaces cannot be defined into a principal bundle structure. An higher gauge theory is an attempt to generalize the bundle structure in order to describe horizontal lifts of surfaces. A such attempt is particularly difficult for the non-abelian case. Some structures have been proposed to realize this goal (twisted bundle, gerbes with connection, bundle gerbe, 2-bundle). Each of them uses a category in place of the total space manifold of the usual principal bundle structure. Some of them replace also the structure group by a category (more precisely a Lie crossed module viewed as a category). But the base space remains still a simple manifold (possibly viewed as a trivial category with only identity arrows). We propose a new principal categorical bundle structure, with a Lie crossed module as structure groupoid, but with a base space belonging to a bigger class of categories (which includes non-trivial categories), that we called affine 2-spaces. We study the geometric structure of the categorical bundles built on these categories (which are a more complicated structure than the 2-bundles) and the connective structures on these bundles. Finally we treat an example interesting for quantum dynamics which is associated with the Bloch wave operator theory. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.