This is a survey article based on the author’s Master thesis on affine representations of a gauge group. Most of the results presented here are well-known to differential geometers and physicists familiar with gauge theory. However, we hope this short systematic presentation offers a useful self-contained introduction to the subject.In the first part we present the construction of the group of motions of a Hilbert space and we explain the way in which it can be considered as a Lie group. The second...

We study some Riemannian metrics on the space of smooth regular curves in the plane, viewed as the orbit space of maps from $S^1$ to the plane modulo the group of diffeomorphisms of $S^1$, acting as reparametrizations. In particular we investigate the metric, for a constant $A>0$, $G_c^A(h,k):={\int }_{S^1}(1+A{\kappa }_c{\left(\theta \right)}^2)\langle h\left(\theta \right),k\left(\theta \right)\rangle \left|c^{\text{'}}\left(\theta \right)\right|d\theta$ where ${\kappa }_c$ is the curvature of the curve $c$ and $h$, $k$ are normal vector fields to $c$. The term $A{\kappa }^2$ is a sort of geometric Tikhonov regularization because, for $A=0$, the geodesic distance between any two distinct curves is 0, while for $A>0$ the...