Homotopy types of topological stacks

Abstract: We define the notion of {em classifying space} of a topological stack and show that every topological stack X has a classifying space X which is a topological space well-defined up to weak homotopy equivalence. Under a certain paracompactness condition on X, we show that X is actually well-defined up to homotopy equivalence. These results are formulated in terms of functors from the category of topological stacks to the (weak) homotopy category of topological spaces. We prove similar results for (small) diagrams of topological stacks.

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The author continues his earlier work on the homotopy theory of topological stacks. This paper is concerned with associating a homotopy type (in the usual sense) to a topological stack in such a way that many algebraic topology constructions (e.g., homology) for spaces can be extended to stacks simply by applying them to the homotopy type.NEWLINENEWLINEThe first, and simplest, definition given is that the homotopy type \(\Theta(\mathcal{X})\) of a stack \(\mathcal{X}\) presented by a groupoid \(R \rightrightarrows X\) is the classifying space (in the sense of Milnor, using the infinite join construction, or equivalently, the fat realization of the simplicial nerve) of the groupoid. It is shown that there is a canonical morphism \(\varphi: \Theta(\mathcal{X}) \to \mathcal{X}\) which enjoys certain nice properties: (1) it is a universal weak equivalence in the sense that the pullback of \(\varphi\) along a map of a space into \(\mathcal{X}\) is a weak equivalence; (2) moreover, it is locally shrinkable (in the sense of Dold, a stronger condition than being a universal weak equivalence).NEWLINENEWLINEThis construction depends on the choice of an atlas for \(\mathcal{X}\). The author promptly addresses this shortcoming by showing that \(\Theta(\mathcal{X})\) can be made to depend functorially on the stack \(\mathcal{X}\). Using some general category theoretic tricks, the author shows that the inclusion of the 1-category of spaces into the 1-category of topological stacks admits a right adjoint \(\Theta\) \textit{after} localizing both categories by inverting all weak equivalences of spaces. This now provides a functorial weak homotopy type for topological stacks. By imposing some point-set topology hypotheses on \(\mathcal{X}\), the author then refines the above to make the homotopy type well-defined up to homotopy equivalence, not just weak homotopy equivalence.NEWLINENEWLINEMotivated by the need to handle the stack of maps between two topological stacks (which, it seems, need not admit an atlas itself), the author defines certain classes of stacks on spaces which behave like topological stacks when restricted to paracompact spaces. He then extends the functorial (weak) homotopy type construction to include these larger classes of stacks.NEWLINENEWLINEFollowing this there are brief sections discussing homotopy groups and cohomology of topological stacks. With a mild hypothesis, the homotopy groups of the homotopy type are isomorphic to the homotopy groups of the stack as defined previously by the author in [\textit{B. Noohi}, ``Foundations of topological stacks, I. \url{math.AG/0503247v1}].NEWLINENEWLINEFinally, the author shows that the already-developed results immediately allow the functorial homotopy types of stacks to be extended to functorial homotopy types for small diagrams of stacks.

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