A coherent homotopy category of 2-track commutative cubes (Q633789)

The objects of study are coherently commutative (\(3\)-dimensional) cubical diagrams: faces commute up to homotopy via so-called semi-tracks, and the cube itself comes with a \(2\)-track, fixing a homotopy between adequate compositions of semi-tracks. Such cubes can be concatenated horizontally, vertically, and laterally, which gives rise to a twisted triple category, as observed by the first two authors in former work. To reduce the amount of coherent homotopies one has to handle, the authors consider instead a category of homotopy commutative squares, which can be composed vertically and laterally. The horizontal operation is now encoded as the morphisms of this category, which satisfy of course a coherent homotopy relation. The isomorphisms in this ``homotopy category of homotopy squares'' are shown to be precisely represented by objectwise homotopy equivalences. Triple Toda brackets are quickly reviewed in the last section and quaternary ones are identified as certain \(2\)-tracks.