Calculus of the embedding functor and spaces of knots

This paper investigates the space of codimension zero embeddings of a Poincare duality space in a disk. One of our main results exhibits a tower that interpolates from the space of Poincare immersions to a certain space of "unlinked" Poincare embeddings. The layers of this tower are described in terms of the coefficient spectra of the identity appearing in Goodwillie's homotopy functor calculus. We also answer a question posed to us by Sylvain Cappell. The appendix proposes a...

We work out the details of a correspondence observed by Goodwillie between cosimplicial spaces and good functors from a category of open subsets of the interval to the category of compactly generated weak Hausdorff spaces. Using this, we compute the first page of the integral Bousfield--Kan homotopy spectral sequence of the tower of fibrations given by the Taylor tower of the embedding functor associated to the space of long knots. Based on the methods in [Con08], we give a c...

The motivation of this work is to define cohomology classes in the space of knots that are both easy to find and to evaluate, by reducing the problem to simple linear algebra. We achieve this goal by defining a combinatorial graded cochain complex, such that the elements of an explicit submodule in the cohomology define algebraic intersections with some "geometrically simple" strata in the space of knots. Such strata are endowed with explicit co-orientations, that are canonic...

The paper describes a natural splitting in the rational homology and homotopy of the spaces of long knots. This decomposition presumably arises from the cabling maps in the same way as a natural decomposition in the homology of loop spaces arises from power maps. The generating function for the Euler characteristics of the terms of this splitting is presented. Based on this generating function we show that both the homology and homotopy ranks of the spaces in question grow at...

We present two models for the space of knots which have endpoints at fixed boundary points in a manifold with boundary, one model defined as an inverse limit of spaces of maps between configuration spaces and another which is cosimplicial. These models build on the calculus of isotopy functors and are weakly homotopy equivalent to knot spaces when the ambient dimension is greater than three. The mapping space model, and the evaluation map on which it builds, is suitable for a...

The homotopy fiber of the inclusion from the long embedding space to the long immersion space is known to be an iterated based loop space (if the codimension is greater than two). In this paper we deloop the homotopy fiber to obtain the topological Stiefel manifold, combining results of Lashof and of Lees. We also give a delooping of the long embedding space, which can be regarded as a version of Morlet-Burghelea-Lashof's delooping of the diffeomorphism group of the disk rela...

Homology groups of spaces of nonsingular polynomial embeddings ${\bf R}^1 \to {\bf R}^n$ of degrees $\le 4$ are calculated. A general algebraic technique of such calculations for spaces of polynomial knots of arbitrary degrees is described.

Let K be the space of long j-knots in R^n. In this paper we introduce a graph complex D and a linear map I from D to the de Rham complex of K via configuration space integral, and prove that (1) when both n>j>=3 are odd, the map I is a cochain map if restricted to graphs with at most one loop component, (2) when n-j>=2 is even, the map I is a cochain map if restricted to tree graphs, and (3) when n-j >=3 is odd, the map I added a correction term produces a (2n-3j-3)-cocycle o...

We exploit the Galois symmetries of the little disks operads to show that many differentials in the Goodwillie-Weiss spectral sequences approximating the homology and homotopy of knot spaces vanish at a prime $p$. Combined with recent results on the relationship between embedding calculus and finite-type theory, we deduce that the $(n+1)$-st Goodwillie-Weiss approximation is a $p$-local universal Vassiliev invariant of degree $\leq n$ for every $n \leq p + 1$.

Vassiliev's spectral sequence for long knots is discussed. Briefly speaking we study what happens if the strata of non-immersions are ignored. Various algebraic structures on the spectral sequence are introduced. General theorems about these structures imply, for example, that the bialgebra of chord diagrams is polynomial for any field of coefficients.