An open-closed cobordism category with background space (Q1017853)

Cobordism categories play a central role in the mathematical formulation of topological field theories, this goes back to the foundational work of Atiyah, Segal and Witten. Recently Galatius, Madsen, Tillmann and Weiss have identified the topological realization of these categories with Thom spectra. This result is based on a deep generalization of the Pontryagin-Thom construction. In dimension 2 these results provide a beautiful homotopical proof of Mumford's conjecture which identifies the stable cohomology of moduli spaces of curves; this result is a consequence of Harer's stability theorem. In this very well-written paper the author studies open-closed cobordism categories in dimension 2 with maps in a background space, this study is motivated by conformal field theory and string topology. The author identifies the classifying space of this category for certain classes of background spaces. The key ingredient is the homology stability of mapping class groups with twisted coefficients.