Homotopy groups of Hom complexes of graphs (Q1003632)

From the abstract: The notion of \(\times\)-homotopy from \textit{A. Dochtermann} [Eur. J. Comb. 30, No. 2, 490--509 (2009; Zbl 1167.05017 )] is investigated in the context of the category of pointed graphs. The main result is a long exact sequence that relates the higher homotopy groups of the space Hom\(_{*}(G,H)\) with the homotopy groups of Hom\(_{*}(G,H^I)\). Here Hom\(_{*}(G,H)\) is a space which parameterizes pointed graph maps from \(G\) to \(H\) (a pointed version of the usual Hom complex), and \(H^I\) is the graph of based paths in \(H\). As a corollary it is shown that \(\pi _i(\)Hom\(_{*}(G,H))\cong [G,\varOmega ^iH]_{\times }\), where \(\varOmega H\) is the graph of based closed paths in \(H\) and \([G,K]_{\times }\) is the set of \(\times \)-homotopy classes of pointed graph maps from \(G\) to \(K\).