Nonabelian 2-forms and loop space connections from SCFT deformations

It is shown how the deformation of the superconformal generators on the string’s worldsheet by a nonabelian super-Wilson line gives rise to a covariant exterior derivative on loop space coming from a nonabelian 2-form on target space. The expression obtained this way is new in the context of strings (but has been considered before in the context of integrable systems), and its consistency is verified by checking that its global gauge transformations on loop space imply the familiar gauge transformations on target space. We derive the second order gauge transformation from infinitesimal local gauge transformations on loop space and find that a consistent picture is obtained only when the sum of the 2-form and the 1-form field strengths vanish. The same condition has recently been derived from 2-group gauge theory reasoning. We observe that this condition implies that the connection on loop space is flat, which is a crucial sufficient condition for the nonabelian surface holonomy induced by it to be well defined. Finally we compute the background equations of motion of the nonabelian 2-form by canceling divergences in the deformed boundary state.