Orbispaces and Orbifolds from the Point of View of the Borel Construction, a new Definition

The problem in question is whether the quotient space of a compact linear group is a topological manifold and whether it is a homological manifold. In the paper, the case of an infinite group with commutative connected component is considered.

For an orbifold, there is a notion of an orbifold embedding, which is more general than the one of sub-orbifolds. We develop several properties of orbifold embeddings. In the case of translation groupoids, we show that such a notion is equivalent to a strong equivariant immersion.

We construct a 2-category version of tom Dieck's equivariant fundamental groupoid for representable orbifolds and show that the discrete fundamental groupoid is Morita invariant; hence an orbifold invariant for representable orbifolds.

An equivariant topological field theory is defined on a cobordism category of manifolds with principal fiber bundles for a fixed (finite) structure group. We provide a geometric construction which for any given morphism $G \to H$ of finite groups assigns in a functorial way to a $G$-equivariant topological field theory an $H$-equivariant topological field theory, the pushforward theory. When $H$ is the trivial group, this yields an orbifold construction for $G$-equivariant to...

We build a concrete and natural model for the strict 2-category of orbifolds. In particular we prove that if one localizes the 2-category of proper etale Lie groupoids at a class of 1-arrows that we call "covers", then the strict 2-category structure drops down to the localization. In our construction the spaces of 1- and 2-arrows admit natural topologies, the space of morphisms (1-arrows) between two orbifolds is naturally a groupoid and the symmetries of an orbifold form a ...

We define a 2-category structure (Pre-Orb) on the category of reduced complex orbifold atlases. We construct a 2-functor F from (Pre-Orb) to the 2-category (Grp) of proper \'etale effective groupoid objects over the complex manifolds. Both on (Pre-Orb) and (Grp) there are natural equivalence relations on objects: (a natural extension of) equivalence of orbifold atlases in (Pre-Orb) and Morita equivalences in (Grp). We prove that F induces a bijection between the equivalence c...

The main result is that the fundamental groupoid of the orbit space of a discontinuous action of a discrete group on a Hausdorff space which admits a universal cover is the orbit groupoid of the fundamental groupoid of the space. We also describe work of Higgins and of Taylor which makes this result usable for calculations. As an example, we compute the fundamental group of the symmetric square of a space. The main result, which is related to work of Armstrong, is due to Br...

In this paper we study the string topology (\'a la Chas-Sullivan) of an orbifold. We define the string homology ring product at the level of the free loop space of the classifying space of an orbifold. We study its properties (introducing an operad to do so) and do some explicit calculations.

It is well-known that reduced smooth orbifolds and proper effective foliation Lie groupoids form equivalent categories. However, for certain recent lines of research, equivalence of categories is not sufficient. We propose a notion of maps between reduced smooth orbifolds and a definition of a category in terms of marked proper effective \'etale Lie groupoids such that the arising category of orbifolds is isomorphic (not only equivalent) to this groupoid category.

In a previous article, we defined a very flexible notion of suborbifold and characterized those suborbifolds which can arise as the images of orbifold embeddings. In particular, suborbifolds are images of orbifold embeddings precisely when they are saturated and split. This article addresses the problem of orbifold structure inheritance for three orbifolds $\mathcal{Q}\subset\mathcal{P}\subset\mathcal{O}$. We identify an appealing but ultimately inadequate notion of an inheri...