Little cubes and long knots (Q864591)

By a famous result of Schubert one knows that the set of isotopy classes of knots in \(\mathbb R^3\) is a free commutative monoid on prime knots (the product is just the connected sum). This paper is a beautiful space level refinement of Schubert's result. The author first proves that the space of long tubes is an algebra over the operad of little 2-cubes. The idea is to mix two basic operations for tubes: concatenation and insertion. This mixing is nicely encoded by the operad of little 2-cubes and explains the commutativity ``up to homotopy'' of the concatenation product. In fact the author proves much more, he studies the algebraic structure of various embedding spaces via the action of operads of little cubes, and as a byproduct he obtains a new proof of Morlet's theorem that states that the topological group of boundary fixing smooth diffeomorphisms of the unit \(n\)-dimensional closed disc is homotopy equivalent to an \(n+1\)-fold loop space. As the space of long knots is a retract of the space of long tubes we obtain an operadic action on the space of long knots. Moreover the author proves the remarkable fact that the space of long knots is homotopy equivalent to the free little 2-cubes object over the pointed space of prime long knots; taking the connected components one recovers Schubert's result. The proof uses in an essential way the JSJ decomposition of knot complements.