Crossed interval groups and operations on the Hochschild cohomology (Q470336)

In this article, the authors provide a solution to the long-standing problem of understanding natural operations on the Hochschild cochain complex. For this, they organize such operations into a dg operad \(\mathcal{B}\) which turns out to have the homotopy type of the little \(2\)-disks operad with inverted grading \(C_{-*}D_2\). More precisely, they construct an \(\mathbb{N}\)-colored operad \(B=\{B^l_{k_1,...,k_n}\}\), where each \(B^l_{k_1,...,k_n}\) consists of trees giving rise to operations of the form \(C^{k_1}(A,A)\otimes ...\otimes C^{k_n}(A,A)\rightarrow C^l(A,A)\) on the Hochschild cochain complex \(C^*(A,A)\) of an associative algebra \(A\) (the natural operations). They first compare these natural operations with a more categorical notion of natural operation, which acts on the endomorphism operad of any monoid in any symmetric monoidal category. Such operations form another \(\mathbb{N}\)-colored operad which turns out to be isomorphic to \(B\) (Theorem A), thus the two notions of natural operation are equivalent. To the \(\mathbb{N}\)-colored operad \(B\) they associate a family of functors \(\{B_{\bullet_1,...,\bullet_n}^{\bullet}:\Delta\times(\Delta^{\mathrm{op}})^n\rightarrow \mathrm{Ab}\}_{n\in\mathbb{N}}\), then they apply the multisimplicial totalization and cosimplicial totalization to get the dg operad \(\mathcal{B}\) of natural operations. The second main theorem of this article (Theorem B) asserts that \(\mathcal{B}\) has the homotopy type of \(C_{-*}D_2\). This actually follows from the more general Theorem C, proving that several suboperads of \(\mathcal{B}\) have the homotopy type of \(C_{-*}D_2\), including \(\mathcal{B}\) itself and the operad of braces. The case of natural operations on non-unital algebras is addressed as well. The crux of this work is the notion of crossed interval group which consists roughly of a sequence of groups \(H=\{H_n\}\) and an associated category \(\mathcal{I}H\) giving rise to an adjunction \(F_H:\mathcal{C}^{\Delta}\leftrightarrows \mathcal{C}^{\mathcal{I}H^{\mathrm{op}}}:U\), where \(\mathcal{C}\) is a cocomplete category and \(\mathcal{C}^{\Delta}\) the category of cosimplicial objects in \(\mathcal{C}\). The functor \(U\) is the forgetful functor and \(F_H\) is a ``crossed interval extension''. In the particular case where \(\mathcal{C}\) is the category of chain complexes, the cosimplicial totalization of the unit of this adjunction is a homotopy equivalence (Theorem 4.4). The authors show that the dg operad \(\mathcal{B}\) is the cosimplicial totalization of a certain crossed interval extension, which is, using the aforementioned result, homotopy equivalent to a dg operad already well known by an earlier work of \textit{M. A. Batanin} and \textit{C. Berger} [Contemp. Math. 504, 23--52 (2009; Zbl 1221.18006)]. The latter operad has the homotopy type of \(C_{-*}D_2\).