On spineless cacti, Deligne's conjecture and Connes-Kreimer's Hopf algebra (Q864594)

This paper studies various topological (quasi-) operads of spineless cacti. Roughly speaking, spineless cacti are treelike configurations of circles in the plane. They are a variant of the cacti introduced by Voronov to encode the BV-algebra structure of string topology [\textit{A. A. Voronov}, Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 73, 81--103 (2005; Zbl 1083.18005)]. The author gives a cell decomposition of the space of spineless normalised cacti, where the cells are indexed by a certain kind of tree. This space is homotopy equivalent to that of (unnormalised) spineless cacti. The spineless normalised cacti make up a topological quasi-operad, where `quasi' signifies that the composition operations are only associative up to homotopy. The quasi-operad structure corresponds to the operad structure on the unnormalised spineless cacti, so that the cell structure provides, via taking cellular chains, an operadic chain model for spineless cacti. It is known that the spineless cactus operad is equivalent to the little discs operad [\textit{R. M. Kaufmann}, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 5, 237--300 (2005; Zbl 1083.55007)]. A new proof of Deligne's conjecture is given by showing that the cellular chains on the spineless cacti act on the Hochschild cochains of any associative algebra. Furthermore, this is a minimal solution, in the sense that the cells naturally encode exactly the possible iterations of multiplication and brace operations. The top dimensional cells of the cell structure are related to the pre-Lie algebra operad. This connection is used to give a construction which associates a pre-Lie algebra, and thus also a Lie algebra and a Hopf algebra, to any operad which admits a direct sum. Connes' and Kreimer's Hopf algebra [\textit{A. Connes} and \textit{D. Kreimer}, Commun. Math. Phys. 199, No. 1, 203--242 (1998; Zbl 0932.16038)] is exhibited as an example of this construction applied to a certain operad of trees.