Abstract:
We study some graded geometric constructions appearing naturally in the
context of gauge theories. In terms of Q-bundles we describe the gauge
transformations of the (twisted) Poisson and Dirac sigma models. Inspired by
a known relation of gauging with equivariant cohomology we generalize the
latter notion to the case of arbitrary Q-manifolds. This permits to obtain
the mentioned sigma models by gauging essentially infinite dimensional
groups and describe their symmetries in terms of classical differential
geometry. This approach can also be useful to study supersymmetric gauge
theories.