Orbifolds as stacks?

Eugene Lerman

Published 2008-06-25, updated 2009-06-17Version 2

The first goal of this survey paper is to argue that if orbifolds are groupoids, then the collection of orbifolds and their maps has to be thought of as a 2-category. Compare this with the classical definition of Satake and Thurston of orbifolds as a 1-category of sets with extra structure and/or with the "modern" definition of orbifolds as proper etale Lie groupoids up to Morita equivalence. The second goal is to describe two complementary ways of thinking of orbifolds as a 2-category: 1. the weak 2-category of foliation Lie groupoids, bibundles and equivariant maps between bibundles and 2. the strict 2-category of Deligne-Mumford stacks over the category of smooth manifolds.