A bigroupoid's topology (or, topologising the homotopy bigroupoid of a space) (Q504544)

The fundamental bigroupoid of a topological space \(X\) is, roughly speaking, the bicategory with objects points of \(X\), \(1\)-morphisms paths in \(X\), and \(2\)-morphisms homotopies (relative to endpoints) between paths; those homotopies are taken modulo homotopy. The goal of the paper under review is to promote this construction to a \textit{topological} bigroupoid, that is, give suitable topologies to the sets of objects, \(1\)-morphism, and \(2\)-morphisms. The first two are just the original topology of \(X\) and the compact-open topology on the path space. The biggest challenge is to define an appropriate topology on the set of homotopy classes of homotopies between paths, so that compositions and all other categorical operations are continuous. As a technical condition, it is required that \(X\) is semilocally \(2\)-connected, i.e., there exists a basis of neighborhoods \(\{ U \}\) which are simply-connected and \(\pi_2(U) \to \pi_2(X)\) is the zero map. Finally, it is shown that if \(X\) is locally relatively contractible, then its fundamental bigroupoid is locally trivial. This condition is closely related to the existence of a locally trivial \(2\)-bundle associated to the groupoid. In this sense, this result is a higher analogue of the fact that the universal cover of a semilocally simply connected space admits local trivializations.