Floer homology of cotangent bundles and the loop product (Q982169)

It is well known that the Floer homologies of many special classes of closed symplectic manifolds can be identified with their singular homologies, a fact proved by A. Floer and later extended to larger and larger classes by several authors. If one replaces a compact manifold \(M\) by its cotangent bundle \(T^*M\) in the above identification, then one must replace the singular homology of \(M\) by the singular homology of \(\Lambda(M)\), the free loop space of \(M\). Let \(M\) be a closed oriented manifold. Endow the Floer homology of \(T^*M\) with the pair-of-paints product and the singular homology of \(\Lambda(M)\) with its Chas-Sullivan loop product. Then the main result of this paper is to show that the isomorphism between the Floer homology of \(T^*M\) and the singular homology of \(\Lambda(M)\) is in fact a ring isomorphism. It may be mentioned that the Chas-Sullivan loop product is the free loop space version of the classical Pontryagin product on the singular homology of \(\Omega(M, *)\) of loops in \(M\) based at \(*\). The paper is a fundamental contribution in this area.