AKSZ Descent on Manifolds with Ordinary Corners

Abstract

Under an explicit formal mapping-space hypothesis, we develop a facewise formulation of the classical AKSZ construction on compact oriented manifolds with ordinary corners. The codimension-$r$ data---a mapping space carrying a closed two-form of degree $r-1$, an action of degree $r$, and a cohomological vector field---and the modified Batalin--Vilkovisky/Batalin--Fradkin--Vilkovisky Hamiltonian identity relating consecutive strata are those of the maximally extended BV--BFV theory of Cattaneo--Mnev--Reshetikhin. What is added here is the organization over the entire face poset: the Hamiltonian defect on a face is the sum of the pullbacks of the primitives on its codimension-one faces, weighted by the orientation incidence numbers, so that the boundary term of the single-stratum identity is resolved into its connected pieces with signs. Organizing these defects by the face incidence complex yields a total-complex theorem: factorially normalized facewise transgression is a cochain map, so closed target forms transgress to cocycles, and the twice-iterated defect vanishes because the signed face differential squares to zero. We verify all four codimension-two cancellations explicitly for four-dimensional BF theory on $M=\Gamma\times[0,1]^2$. We also establish a reduction criterion for singular corner data. If a raw codimension-two descendant is presymplectic and its reduced Dirac structure is the graph of a Poisson bivector, the shifted cotangent construction gives a canonical strict degree-two corner theory. The passage from a reduced Poisson bivector to a strict corner theory is already recorded in \cite{CFT2026}; what is isolated here is the hypothesis under which it applies, and its relation to the face-incidence structure. The construction provides a rigorous ordinary-corner benchmark for extensions of AKSZ descent to Joyce generalized corners.