No Arabic abstract
Let G be a compact Lie group. By work of Chataur and Menichi, the homology of the space of free loops in the classifying space of G is known to be the value on the circle in a homological conformal field theory. This means in particular that it admits operations parameterized by homology classes of classifying spaces of diffeomorphism groups of surfaces. Here we present a radical extension of this result, giving a new construction in which diffeomorphisms are replaced with homotopy equivalences, and surfaces with boundary are replaced with arbitrary spaces homotopy equivalent to finite graphs. The result is a novel kind of field theory which is related to both the diffeomorphism groups of surfaces and the automorphism groups of free groups with boundaries. Our work shows that the algebraic structures in string topology of classifying spaces can be brought into line with, and in fact far exceed, those available in string topology of manifolds. For simplicity, we restrict to the characteristic 2 case. The generalization to arbitrary characteristic will be addressed in a subsequent paper.
Examples of non-trivial higher string topology operations have been regrettably rare in the literature. In this paper, working in the context of string topology of classifying spaces, we provide explicit calculations of a wealth of non-trivial higher string topology operations associated to a number of different Lie groups. As an application of these calculations, we obtain an abundance of interesting homology classes in the twisted homology groups of automorphism groups of free groups, the ordinary homology groups of holomorphs of free groups, and the ordinary homology groups of affine groups over the integers and the field of two elements.
We calculate the ku-homology of the groups Z/p^n X Z/p and Z/p^2 X Z/p^2. We prove that for this kind of groups the ku-homology contains all the complex bordism information. We construct a set of generators of the annihilator of the ku-toral class. These elements also generates the annihilator of the BP-toral class.
We prove that the set of concordance classes of sections of an infinity-sheaf on a manifold is representable, extending a theorem of Madsen and Weiss. This is reminiscent of an h-principle in which the role of isotopy is played by concordance. As an application, we offer an answer to the question: what does the classifying space of a Segal space classify?
We calculate the annihilator of the ku-toral class for the p-groups Z_{p^2} X Z_{p^k}$ with k > 2. This allows us to give a description of the ku-homology of these groups.
Among the generalizations of Serres theorem on the homotopy groups of a finite complex we isolate the one proposed by Dwyer and Wilkerson. Even though the spaces they consider must be 2-connected, we show that it can be used to both recover known results and obtain new theorems about p-completed classifying spaces.