On several varieties of cacti and their relations (Q2571346)

Motivated by string topology the author introduces the notion of quasi-operads and defines direct, semi-direct and bicrossed products of quasi-operads. In this setting, the normalized version of cacti and spinless cacti are homotopy associative quasi-operads, so that their homology quasi-operads are in fact operads. The main result is that spinless cacti are equivalent, in the sense of Fiedorowicz, to the little discs operad. In this way, the cellular chains of normalized spinless cacti become a convenient model of the little disc operad. This fact together with indexing the chains by trees is the basis for a natural topological solution to Deligne's conjecture on the Hochschild cohomology of an associative algebra. A cyclic version of this conjecture is also proved using the cellular chains of normalized cacti. Along the way, the author gives other pictorial realizations of various types of cacti including trees, ribbon graphs and chord diagrams, which might be useful to relate this theory to other parts of mathematics. Two appendices provide a compilation of the relevant notions of graphs and relate various cacti operads with sub-operads of the Arc operad.