The Fulton-MacPherson operad and the \(W\)-construction (Q2240600)

The Boardman-Vogt \(W\)-construction is a canonical cofibrant replacement of topological operads. A classical application is the construction of an explicit zig-zag connecting the little \(n\)-discs operad to the Fulton-MacPherson operad \(F_n\). The main result of this paper is that \(WF_n\) is not only weak-equivalent but actually \textit{isomorphic} to \(F_n\) and this isomorphism is compatible with the action of the orthogonal group \(O(n)\). The \(W\)-construction of an operad \(\mathcal P\) is essentially obtained as the usual free (tree) construction on the symmetric sequence underlying \(\mathcal P\), but adding lengths to internal edges so that when a length is zero, the edge gets contracted using the operadic structure of \(\mathcal P\). Similarly, due to the tree structure of its boundary, \(F_n\) also looks like a free operad on its interior, if we disregard part of its topological structure. Using this, the main result is shown by constructing maps \(\beta_k\colon F_n(k) \to WF_n(k)\), inductively on \(k\), that sufficiently far from the boundary will map a configuration of points to a single vertex tree in \(WF_n(k)\) labeled by the same configuration and on the boundary the behaviour of the map will be imposed by the operadic structure. To interpolate between the two in a continuous and \(O(n)\)-equivariant way, one needs to have an \(O(n)\)-stable collar neigbourhood of the boundary of \(F_n\) (Proposition 5.4).