No label defined (Q4947937)

Besides the well-known simplicial category there exists a similar cubical category with cubes indexed by dimension as objects and the obvious face and degeneracy maps as morphisms. The cubical category provides a convenient framework for dealing with product operations in combinatorial topology. In the present paper it is shown that the cobar construction \(\Omega \overline{C}_* (X)\) of a simply connected space \(X\) coincides with the chain complex of a cubical set and is thus a cubical abelian group. Moreover it is proven that the Adams map \[ \Phi: \Omega \overline{C}_*(X)\to C^N (Q(\Omega X)) \] is induced by a map of cubical sets. Here \(C^N (Q(\Omega X))\) is the normalized chain complex of the singular cubical complex of the loop space of \(X\). The Adams map is thus a map of cubical abelian groups. This result enables the authors to construct explicit geometric coproducts \[ \nabla_i: \Omega \overline{C}_*(X)\to \Omega \overline{C}_*(X) \otimes \Omega \overline{C}_*(X) \] on the cobar construction which are dual to the Steenrod \(\cup_i\) products.