Higher path groupoids and the holonomy of formal power series connections

Abstract

Building on ideas of Kohno, we develop a framework for the construction of higher holonomy functors via the transport of formal power series connections. Using these techniques, we obtain functors from the path groupoid, the path 2-groupoid, and the path 3-groupoid of a manifold. As an application, we construct a Gray functor from the path 3-groupoid of the configuration space of $m$ points in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ for $n⩾4$.