Goodwillie's cosimplicial model for the space of long knots and its applications (Q6074858)

This paper studies spaces of knots, in the spirit of Vassilev's influential work [\textit{V. A. Vasil'ev}, Adv. Sov. Math. 1, 23--69 (1990; Zbl 0727.57008)] from the early 90's. Vassiliev's work considered the space of knots as being a subspace of contractible space (or depending on the setup, in a space of immersions), thus the approach to the study of the homology of the space of knots involved an Alexander duality argument in the appropriate ambient space. In the late 90's \textit{T. G. Goodwillie} and \textit{M. Weiss} [Geom. Topol. 3, 103--118 (1999; Zbl 0927.57028)] discovered a (conjecturally) equivalent way to study the homology of the space of knots, eliminating the Alexander duality step used by Vassiliev. The Goodwillie-Weiss approach had the advantage that it provided a (often highly-connected) map from the embedding space to a tower of spaces, each space in the tower being expressible as a homotopy-limit of cubical diagrams of configuration spaces. Thus the technique could also be used to study the homotopy groups of spaces of embeddings, not just the homology. \textit{K. P. Scannell} and \textit{D. P. Sinha} [J. Pure Appl. Algebra 170, No. 1, 93--107 (2002; Zbl 1004.55010)] gave a detailed account of this spectral sequence for the rational homotopy of the space of embeddings of an interval \(I\) in \(D^n\), which I denote \(Emb(I, D^n)\). They included a detailed description of the \(E^1\)-page together with the differential. Sinha and Scannell used the language of homotopy groups of configuration spaces and Whitehead brackets. This allowed them to do some explicit computations of a range of rational homotopy groups for the embedding spaces Emb\((I, D^n)\) for \(n \geq 4\), including the computation of the `type 2' invariant \(\mathbb Q \otimes \pi_{2n-6} \mathrm{Emb}(I, D^n) \simeq \mathbb Q\), which was pushed down to an integral computation of the classical type-2 invariant \(\pi_0 \mathrm{Emb}(I, D^3) \to \mathbb Z\) in the follow-on paper [\textit{R. Budney} et al., Adv. Math. 191, No. 1, 78--113 (2005; Zbl 1078.57011)]. The follow-on paper laid-out a fairly concrete strategy for studying finite-type invariants from the perspective of the Embedding Calculus. \textit{J. Conant}'s paper [Am. J. Math. 130, No. 2, 341--357 (2008; Zbl 1148.57034)] proved one of the conjectures from [\textit{R. Budney} et al., Adv. Math. 191, No. 1, 78--113 (2005; Zbl 1078.57011)], rationally identifying the diagonal of the \(E^2\)-page as essentially the same space of Feynman diagrams discovered in Vassiliev's original theory, at the corresponding page of his spectral sequence. This paper appears to be a modernization of Conant's paper, proving results over the integers for the homotopy spectral sequence of Emb\((I, D^3)\), whereas Conant's paper worked rationally. Theorem 0.2 of this paper would appear to be an integral simplification of Corollary 4.3 from Scannell and Sinha [loc. cit.]. Proposition 0.3 of this paper is a new result. Roughly speaking it shows how Conant's rational computation can be seen in the integral language of this paper, which is spelled out in the subsequent results, namely Corollary 0.6 which is analogous to Theorem 2.2 from Conant [loc. cit.]. This paper fails to mention a significant recent recent result on these topics, due to Horel [\textit{P. Boavida De Brito} and \textit{G. Horel}, Compos. Math. 157, No. 5, 997--1021 (2021; Zbl 1467.57001)]. The result states all the differentials of the homotopy spectral sequence are zero on the \(E_2\)-page, i.e. the spectral sequence collapses at the \(E_2\) page. Horel similarly proves the result over a range when using the coefficients \(\mathbb Z_p\).