Equivariant differential characters and symplectic reduction (Q1028577)

This paper deals with a description of equivariant differential characters (classifying equivariant circle bundles with connections), their prequantization and reduction. As a continuation of the authors paper [J. Gökova Geom. Topol. GGT 2, 14--39 (2008; Zbl 1181.53078)], this paper concerns the understanding of geometric (pre-)quantization and symplectic reduction in the context of stacks which justify two useful reasons and support this approach as stated in the paper: The first is the fact that symplectic quotients are generally orbifolds (i.e., Deligne-Mumford stacks) and the second is that since the language of stacks make it possible to work locally, then one gets rid of the unnecessary troublesome and messy Cech-type arguments. The main technical result of the paper is Theorem 1.5.1 in which the authors construct a prequantization equivalence between a certain category of differential character and a category of equivariant principal circle bundle with arbitrary connection. This construction has two useful properties of which the first one is allowing one to track invariance properties of the connections via the corresponding differential characters and the second one is that the functor of quantization equivalence commutes with pull-backs which suggests that ``prequantization commutes with the reduction theorem''. Moreover, in this paper the authors obtain several interesting results and they are also able to offer some examples of differential characters and reduction.