Another construction of the central extension of the loop group (Q1105059)

The loop group \(\Omega\) G of a compact group G is the space of \(C^{\infty}\)-maps S \(1\to G\), made into a group by pointwise operations. It has an interesting central extension \({\hat \Omega}\)G by S 1, which is non-trivial as an S 1-bundle. One way to construct it is to use the fact that it becomes topologically trivial when pulled back to the group DG of maps of the disc into G by the restriction map DG\(\to \Omega G\). Conversely, one can construct \({\hat \Omega}\)G as a suitable quotient of an extension of DG. This is explained in detail in section 4.4 of [\textit{A. N. Pressley} and \textit{G. B. Segal}, Loop Groups (1986; Zbl 0618.22011)]; see also [\textit{J. Mickelsson}, Commun. Math. Phys. 110, 173-183 (1987; Zbl 0625.58043)]. The author describes a variant of this construction in which DG is replaced by the set of paths in \(\Omega\) G which are horizontal with respect to a right-invariant connection on the S 1-bundle over \(\Omega\) G is question. This gives a different (though necessarily cohomologous) cocycle from that of the construction from DG.