Moduli spaces of Morse functions for persistence (Q2209747)

Different notions of equivalence for Morse functions on the sphere in the context of persistent homology are considered and new invariants, to study these equivalence classes, are introduced. The authors give a method to relate any two Morse-Smale vector fields on the sphere by a sequence of fundamental moves by considering graph-equivalent Morse functions. One of the new invariants, the nesting poset, is explored. One describes a zigzag poset structure (Corollary 4.1), making steps to extend it combinatorially (Conjecture 4.1), with a goal of developing an enriched barcode. Later, the authors give a lower bound (Conjecture 5.1) to counting height-equivalence classes of Morse functions that factor through \({\mathbb{R}}^3\) as smooth embeddings, which leads to better understanding of Morse functions by their barcode.