Low stages of the Taylor tower for \(r\)-immersions (Q2299400)

Let \(M\) be a smooth manifold, and let \({\mathcal{O}}\) denote the poset of open subsets of \(M\). Manifold calculus of functors studies contravariant functors \(F\colon {\mathcal{O}}\to {\mathrm{Top}}\), where Top denotes the category of topological spaces. It constructs a Taylor tower of functors and natural transformations \[ F(-)\to \bigl( T_\infty F(-)\to \cdots \to T_k F(-)\to T_{k-1} F(-)\to\cdots \to T_0 F(-)\bigr), \] where \(T_\infty(F)\) denotes the inverse limit of the tower. If there is a homotopy equivalence between \(F\) and \(T_\infty F\), the tower is said to converge. Manifold calculus was originally developed to study the embedding functor, i.e., homotopy properties of the space \(\mathrm {Emb}(M,N)\) of smooth embeddings \(M\to N\), where \(M\) and \(N\) are smooth manifolds. In this paper, the authors study the space \(\mathrm {rImm}(M,N)\) of \(r\)-immersions \(M\to N\). By an \(r\)-immersion they mean a smooth immersion that has no \(r\)-fold self-intersections. They consider the Taylor tower of the \(r\)-immersion functor and investigate the connectivity of the various maps involved. They prove that for \(2\leq k\leq r-1\), there are equivalences \[ T_k\mathrm{rImm}(M,N)\to T_{k-1}\mathrm {rImm}(M,N). \] They also show that the map \[ \mathrm {rImm}(M,N)\to \mathrm {Imm}(M,N) \] and the maps \[ \mathrm {rImm}(M,N)\to T_k\mathrm {rImm}(M,N), \] for \(2\leq k\leq r-1\), are \(((r-1)n-rm-1)\)-connected, where \(m\) and \(n\) are the dimensions of \(M\) and \(N\), respectively. The work is related to the study of \(r\)-configuration spaces, which are configuration spaces where up to \(r-1\) points are allowed to be the same. The reason for the results stopping at the \(r\)-th stage of the Taylor tower is that this is the range in which \(r\)-configuration spaces are easy to understand.