Discrete Morse theory and classifying spaces (Q1621470)

The goal of the paper under review is to ``describe a new combinatorial theory of gradient flow on cell complexes which provides direct insight into discrete Morse homotopy.'' While Robin Forman's discrete Morse theory has been successfully applied in such areas as topological combinatorics and homology computations, there has been little application to studying homotopy type. Although Forman proved that one can recover information about the homotopy type of the cell complex by gluing together cells in bijective correspondence to the critical simplices, there is no known recipe for doing so. In particular, there is no known way to use the gradient vector field to accomplish this. This latter idea is the main work of the paper. The authors undertake the task of recovering the homotopy type explicitly via a generalization of the gradient path called a \textbf{flow path}. In order to accomplish this, the authors view a poset as a small category. Let \(f\) be a discrete Morse function on a finite regular CW complex \(X\). It is well-known that such a function induces a partial matching on the cells of \(X\) via the regular pairs of \(f\) or equivalently, the induced gradient vector field of \(f\). Viewing the matching as a bijection \(\mu_f\) between the cells in a regular pair, let \(\mathrm{FP}(\mu_f)\) denote the set of all flow paths induced by \(\mu_f\). This in turn induces a partial order on the set of all flow paths from \(c'\) to \(c\), denoted \(C(\mu_f)(c,c')\). Using a result of G. Segal, we may now construct from this poset (viewed as a small category) a classifying space \(C(\mu_f)\). Given this terse outline, the main result of the paper is stated as follows: Theorem: Let \(X\) be a finite regular CW complex and \(f\) a discrete Morse function on the face poset \(F(X)\). Then the classifying space of the flow category is homotopy equivalent to \(X\). After the introduction, the paper begins with a review of discrete Morse theory, including establishment of notation and review of background results. This section also contains the definition of the flow path along with some of its elementary results. Much of it is combinatorial in nature and can be understood without much exposure to higher category theory, although things start to move into topological territory towards the end of the section. This provides for a nice segue into Section 3 where the authors begin to frame everything in terms of small categories where the proof of the main result is contained in Section 3.4. The paper also includes a fairly substantial appendix containing necessary definitions and properties in the homotopy theory of small categories.