Sheaves of Higher Categories on Generalised Spaces

Abstract: We study the homotopy right Kan extension of homotopy sheaves on a category to its free cocompletion, i.e. to its category of presheaves. Any pretopology on the original category induces a canonical pretopology of generalised coverings on the free cocompletion. We show that with respect to these pretopologies the homotopy right Kan extension along the Yoneda embedding preserves homotopy sheaves valued in (sufficiently nice) simplicial model categories. Moreover, we show that this induces an equivalence between sheaves of spaces on the original category and colimit-preserving sheaves of spaces on its free cocompletion. We present three applications in geometry and topology: first, we prove that diffeological vector bundles descend along subductions of diffeological spaces. Second, we deduce that various flavours of bundle gerbes with connection satisfy $(\infty,2)$-categorical descent. Finally, we investigate smooth diffeomorphism actions in smooth bordism-type field theories on a manifold. We show how these smooth actions allow us to extract the values of a field theory on any object coherently from its values on generating objects of the bordism category.