Orbifold construction for topological field theories

Abstract

An equivariant topological field theory is defined on a cobordism category of manifolds with principal fiber bundles for a fixed (finite) structure group. We provide a geometric construction which for any given morphism G⟶H of finite groups assigns in a functorial way to a G-equivariant topological field theory an H-equivariant topological field theory, the pushforward theory. When H is the trivial group, this yields an orbifold construction for G-equivariant topological field theories which unifies and generalizes several known algebraic notions of orbifoldization.