Central extensions of smooth 2-groups and a finite-dimensional string 2-group (Q538526)

The author considers 2-groups in the bicategory of finite dimensional Lie groupoids, left principal bibundles and bibundle maps. This bicategory is equivalent to the bicategory of smooth stacks and it is an enhancement of the usual bicategory of Lie groupoids, smooth functors and smooth natural transformations. These 2-groups are called smooth 2-groups. The author classifies a large family of central extensions of smooth 2-groups using the Segal-Mitchison topological group cohomology. This result can be applied for a string group which is an \(A_{\infty}\) space and is a 3-connected cover of the group Spin\((n)\). Such a central extension gives a finite dimensional model for String\((n)\).