Supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory as higher Chern-Simons theory

Abstract

We observe that the string field theory actions for the topological sigma models describe higher or categorified Chern-Simons theories. These theories yield dynamical equations for connective structures on higher principal bundles. As a special case, we consider holomorphic higher Chern-Simons theory on the ambitwistor space of four-dimensional space-time. In particular, we propose a higher ambitwistor space action functional for maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory.