Power operations in the Stolz-Teichner program (Q2105818)

Continuing Ando's ``upside-down'' approach of understanding geometric descriptions of a cohomology theory by studying its \textit{a posteriori} cohomology operations, the authors substantiated the connections between geometric field theories and topology, as conjectured by Stolz and Teichner, by constructing, computing, and comparing power operations for closed bordisms. Here, as a symmetric monoidal functor from a bordism category to the category \(\mathcal{V}\) of complex vector spaces, the notion of a geometric field theory incorporates smoothness, supersymmetry, a model geometry on bordisms, and equips bordisms with maps to a smooth stack \(\mathcal{X}\). A geometric power co-operation is then naturally to be defined in super-dimension \(d|\delta\) on \(\mathsf{Bord}^{d|\delta}(\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n)\) by pulling back along the finite-sheeted cover \((\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\times \underline{n})\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n\to\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n\) induced from the projection \(\underline{n}\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n\to\mathrm{pt}\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n\), followed by pushing forward along the evaluation \((\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\times \underline{n})\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n \to\mathcal{X}\) of \(i\in \underline{n}\) on \(\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\) picking out the \(i\)'th factor: \[ \mathsf{Bord}^{d|\delta}(\mathcal{X}^{\times n}\,/\!\!/\,\Sigma_n) \dashrightarrow \mathsf{Bord}^{d|\delta}(\mathcal{X}) \] This will produce a power operation on field theories \(\mathsf{Fun}^\otimes\big(\mathsf{Bord}^{d|\delta}(\mathcal{X}),\mathcal{V}\big)\) by precomposition. For technical reasons (thus the arrow above in dashed line), the authors managed to construct such a cooperation when restricted over the full subcategory of closed bordisms, or more precisely, a particularly convenient cover closed subcategory which was a super-version of the iterated inertia stack (or ghost loop stack) of \(\mathcal{X}\). The authors went on computing and comparing the geometrically defined operations in super-dimensions \(1|1\) and \(2|1\), the cases of interest for equivariant K-theory and equivariant elliptic cohomology, respectively, both over the complex numbers. In particular, geometrically produced constant factors, reminiscent of those appearing in Hecke operators, enable these operations to match up precisely with the corresponding Adams operations. The authors further compared these power operations for \(d\)-dimensional field theories, to power operations for Borel equivariant height-\(d\) Morava E-theory from deformations of formal groups and their isogenies, exhibiting a notable analogy between differential geometry and arithmetic geometry. As such, the authors have arguably succeeded in turning the ``upside-down'' approach back to the natural order of things.