Abstract:
I will give a general introduction to higher-form symmetries and their gauging and discuss both of these in the context of defect TQFTs.
Following the insight that ordinary, group-like global symmetries can be described by topological codimension 1 defects, higher-form symmetries are the generalization to arbitrary codimension. A natural question is how to gauge (higher-form) symmetries from this perspective. I will briefly motivate the orbifold construction as a tool for gauging and present a new construction that produces a candidate orbifold datum from 2-group symmetries in 3d. Lastly, I will use this construction to recover a known class of orbifold data from a 0-form symmetry and show how its gauging can be undone by the gauging of an emergent 1-form symmetry.