This paper contains an overview of background from stable homotopy theory used by Freed--Hopkins in their work on invertible extended topological field theories. We provide a working guide to the stable homotopy category, to the Steenrod algebra and to computations using the Adams spectral sequence. Many examples are worked out in detail to illustrate the techniques.
We survey computations of stable motivic homotopy groups over various fields. The main tools are the motivic Adams spectral sequence, the motivic Adams-Novikov spectral sequence, and the effective slice spectral sequence. We state some projects for future study.
We discuss the current state of knowledge of stable homotopy groups of spheres. We describe a new computational method that yields a streamlined computation of the first 61 stable homotopy groups, and gives new information about the stable homotopy groups in dimensions 62 through 90. The method relies more heavily on machine computations than previous methods, and is therefore less prone to error. The main mathematical tool is the Adams spectral sequence.
We give a method for computing the C_2-equivariant homotopy groups of the Betti realization of a p-complete cellular motivic spectrum over R in terms of its motivic homotopy groups. More generally, we show that Betti realization presents the C_2-equivariant p-complete stable homotopy category as a localization of the p-complete cellular real motivic stable homotopy category.
Let $M$ be a topological monoid with homotopy group completion $Omega BM$. Under a strong homotopy commutativity hypothesis on $M$, we show that $pi_k (Omega BM)$ is the quotient of the monoid of free homotopy classes $[S^k, M]$ by its submonoid of nullhomotopic maps. We give two applications. First, this result gives a concrete description of the Lawson homology of a complex projective variety in terms of point-wise addition of spherical families of effective algebraic cycles. Second, we apply this result to monoids built from the unitary, or general linear, representation spaces of discrete groups, leading to results about lifting continuous families of characters to continuous families of representations.
If K is a discrete group and Z is a K-spectrum, then the homotopy fixed point spectrum Z^{hK} is Map_*(EK_+, Z)^K, the fixed points of a familiar expression. Similarly, if G is a profinite group and X is a discrete G-spectrum, then X^{hG} is often given by (H_{G,X})^G, where H_{G,X} is a certain explicit construction given by a homotopy limit in the category of discrete G-spectra. Thus, in each of two common equivariant settings, the homotopy fixed point spectrum is equal to the fixed points of an explicit object in the ambient equivariant category. We enrich this pattern by proving in a precise sense that the discrete G-spectrum H_{G,X} is just a profinite version of Map_*(EK_+, Z): at each stage of its construction, H_{G,X} replicates in the setting of discrete G-spectra the corresponding stage in the formation of Map_*(EK_+, Z) (up to a certain natural identification).