Generalized Bott-Cattaneo-Rossi invariants of high-dimensional long knots (Q821583)

Let \(M\) be a homology \((n+2)\)-sphere, that is, an \((n+2)\)-dimensional closed smooth oriented manifold which has the homology groups of \(S^{n+2}\). Let \(\infty\) be a point of \(M\) and let \(M^\circ\) denote \(M \backslash \{\infty\}\). An asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) is the manifold \(M^\circ\) equipped with the decomposition \(M^\circ=B(M) \cup B^\circ_\infty\), where \(B^\circ_\infty\) is the punctured ball around \(\infty\) and \(B(M)\) denotes the closure of \(M^\circ \backslash B^\circ_\infty\). A parallelization of an asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) is a bundle isomorphism \(\tau: M^\circ \times \mathbb{R}^{n+2} \to TM^\circ\) that coincides with the canonical trivialization of \(T\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) on \(B^\circ_\infty \times \mathbb{R}^{n+2}\), and \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) is called parallelizable when a parallelization exists. A long knot in an asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) is a smooth embedding \(\psi: \mathbb{R}^n \hookrightarrow M^\circ\) such that \(\psi(x)=(0,0,x) \in B^\circ_\infty\) when \(\Vert x \Vert \geq 1\), where we identify \(B^\circ_\infty\) with the complement of the open unit ball in \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\), and \(\psi(x) \in B(M)\) when \(\Vert x\Vert \leq 1\). The Bott-Cattaneo-Rossi invariants are a family \((Z_k)\) of isotopy invariants of long knots \(\mathbb{R}^n \hookrightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) in the Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\), for an odd integer \(n \geq 3\), given by integrating forms on certain manifolds called the configuration spaces associated to BCR diagrams and a given long knot, where the configuration space is related with the two-point configuration space of \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\), and a BCR diagram is a certain graph with \(2k\) vertices. \newline The main results are as follows. Let \(n\geq 3\) be an odd integer. The author generalizes the Bott-Cattaneo-Rossi invariants \((Z_k)_{k \geq 2}\) \((k \in \mathbb{Z})\) to long knots \(\mathbb{R}^n \hookrightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) in a parallelizable asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\). The generalized invariant \(Z_k\) does not depend on the choice of the parallelization, and takes a rational value, and \(Z_k=0\) when \(k\) is odd, and \(Z_k\) is additive under connected sum of long knots. Further, the author shows that for any odd integer \(n \geq 1\), the connected sum of any asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) with itself is parallelizable, and the author extends \(Z_k\) to any (possibly non-parallelizable) asymptotic homology \(\mathbb{R}^{n+2}\) for an odd integer \(n \geq 3\). In order to give the generalized invariants, the author introduces the notion of propagating forms.