Calculus of the embedding functor and spaces of knots

Motivated by applications to spaces of embeddings and automorphisms of manifolds, we consider a tower of $\infty$-categories of truncated right-modules over a unital $\infty$-operad $\mathcal{O}$. We study monoidality and naturality properties of this tower, identify its layers, describe the difference between the towers as $\mathcal{O}$ varies, and generalise these results to the level of Morita $(\infty,2)$-categories. Applied to the ${\rm BO}(d)$-framed $E_d$-operad, this ...

This paper is a survey of knot theory and invariants of knots and links from the point of view of categories of diagrams. The topics range from foundations of knot theory to virtual knot theory and topological quantum field theory.

This article surveys the use of configuration space integrals in the study of the topology of knot and link spaces. The main focus is the exposition of how these integrals produce finite type invariants of classical knots and links. More generally, we also explain the construction of a chain map, given by configuration space integrals, between a certain diagram complex and the deRham complex of the space of knots in dimension four or more. A generalization to spaces of links,...

We provide a complete understanding of the rational homology of the space of long links of m strands in the euclidean space of dimension d > 3. First, we construct explicitly a cosimplicial chain complex whose totalization is quasi-isomorphic to the singular chain complex of the space of long links. Next we show (using the fact that the Bousfield-Kan spectral sequence associated to this cosimplcial chain complex collapses at the page 2) that the homology Bousfield-Kan spectra...

We define an action of the operad of projective spineless cacti on each stage of the Taylor tower for the space of framed 1-dimensional long knots in any Euclidean space. By mapping a subspace of the overlapping intervals operad to the subspace of normalized cacti, we prove a compatibility of our action with Budney's little 2-cubes action on the space of framed long knots itself. This compatibility is at the level of the multiplication and the Browder and Dyer-Lashof operatio...

Let M and N be smooth manifolds without boundary. Immersion theory suggests that an understanding of the space of smooth embeddings emb(M,N) should come from an analysis of the cofunctor V |--> emb(V,N) from the poset O of open subsets of M to spaces. We therefore abstract some of the properties of this cofunctor, and develop a suitable calculus of such cofunctors, Goodwillie style, with Taylor series and so on. The terms of the Taylor series for the cofunctor V |--> emb(V,N)...

We provide various formulations of knot homology that are predicted by string dualities. In addition, we also explain the rich algebraic structure of knot homology which can be understood in terms of geometric representation theory in these formulations. These notes are based on lectures in the workshop "Physics and Mathematics of Link Homology" at Centre de Recherches Mathematiques, Universite de Montreal.

Sinha has constructed a cosimplicial space X for a fixed integer N. One of his main result states that for N > 3, X is a cosimplicial model for the space of long knots (modulo immersions). On the other hand, Lambrechts, Turchin and Volic showed that for N > 3 the homology Bousfield-Kan spectral sequence associated to Sinha's cosimplicial space collapses at the page 2 rationally. Their approach consists first to prove the formality of some other diagrams approximating X and ne...

The spectral sequence constructed by V.A.Vassiliev computes the homology of the spaces of non-compact knots in ${\bf R}^d$, $d\ge 3$. In this work the first term of this spectral sequence is described in terms of the homology of the Hochschild complex for the Poisson algebras operad, if d is odd (resp. for the Gerstenhaber algebras operads, if d is even). In particular the bialgebra of chord diagrams arises as some subspace of this homology (in this case d=3). Also a simplifi...

In this article we study the Poisson algebra structure on the homology of the totalization of a fibrant cosimplicial space associated with an operad with multiplication. This structure is given as the Browder operation induced by the action of little disks operad, which was found by McClure and Smith. We show that the Browder operation coincides with the Gerstenhaber bracket on the Hochschild homology, which appears as the E2-term of the homology spectral sequence constructed...