Arc operads and arc algebras (Q1426842)

The authors introduce and study several topological and homological operads based on families of projectively weighted arcs in bounded surfaces. The most interesting one of these is the cyclic operad \(\mathcal A\mathcal R\mathcal C\) that corresponds to surfaces with weighted arcs such that all boundary components have arcs emanating from them. The authors review the salient features of the combinatorial compactification of moduli spaces and the sphericity conjecture. Using this background, the operadic products on surfaces with weighted arcs that underlie all of the constructions are defined. The authors uncover the Gerstenhaber and Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) structures of the operad on the level of chains with explicit chain homotopies. These chain homotopies manifestly show the symmetry of these equations. The BV-operator is given by the unique, up to homotopy, cycle of arc families on the cylinder. The cacti operad is included into the arc operad both in its original version as well as in its spineless version. This explicit map, called framing, also shows that the spineless cacti govern the Gerstenhaber structure while the Voronov cacti yield BV; this fact can also be read off from the explicit calculations for the respective suboperads of \(\mathcal A\mathcal R\mathcal C\), which are also defined. The difference between the two sub-operads are operations corresponding to a Fenchel-Nielsen type deformation of the cylinder, i.e., the 1-ary operation of \(\mathcal A\mathcal R\mathcal C\). A general construction which forgets the topological structure of the underlying surface and retains a collection of parametrized loops in the plane with incidence/tangency conditions dictated by the arc families is given. Using this partial forgetful map, the action of a suboperad of \(\mathcal A\mathcal R\mathcal C\) on loop spaces of manifolds is defined. For the particular suboperads corresponding to cacti, this operation is inverse to the framing. Several direct and semi-direct products of the operad with cyclic and non-cyclic operads built on circles are defined. One of these products yields for instance dGBV algebras. The operads built on circles which the authors utilize are provided by the analysis of this type of operad in the Appendix. The approach is a classification of all operations that are linear and local in the coordinates of the components to be glued. The results are not contingent on the particular choice of \(S^1\), but only on certain algebraic properties like being a monoid and are thus of a more general nature.