Higher Whitehead products in moment-angle complexes and substitution of simplicial complexes

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Publication:2285391



Abstract: We study the question of realisability of iterated higher Whitehead products with a given form of nested brackets by simplicial complexes, using the notion of the moment-angle complex ZK. Namely, we say that a simplicial complex K realises an iterated higher Whitehead product w if w is a nontrivial element of pi∗(ZK). The combinatorial approach to the question of realisability uses the operation of substitution of simplicial complexes: for any iterated higher Whitehead product w we describe a simplicial complex partialDeltaw that realises w. Furthermore, for a particular form of brackets inside w, we prove that partialDeltaw is the smallest complex that realises w. We also give a combinatorial criterion for the nontriviality of the product w. In the proof of nontriviality we use the Hurewicz image of w in the cellular chains of ZK and the description of the cohomology product of ZK. The second approach is algebraic: we use the coalgebraic versions of the Koszul and Taylor complex for the face coalgebra of K to describe the canonical cycles corresponding to iterated higher Whitehead products w. This gives another criterion for realisability of w.


With a simplicial complex \(K\) on the set \([m]=\{1,\ldots, m\}\), a moment-angle complex \(\mathcal Z_K\) can be associated as a cellular subcomplex of the product space \((D^2)^m\). An interesting but extremely difficult problem is to understand the homotopy type of \(\mathcal Z_K\) or its homotopy groups \(\pi_*(\mathcal Z_K)\). Many topological and geometrical properties of moment-angle complexes are often encoded in nontrivial combinatorial features of simplicial complexes \(K\). In this paper, the authors study the question of realisability of iterated higher Whitehead products in \(\pi_*(\mathcal Z_K)\) in two ways: combinatorially by introducing certain substitutions of simplicial complexes and algebraically by looking at the coalgebraic versions of the Koszul and Taylor complexes of the face coalgebra of \(K\), which is a dual of the Stanley-Reisner algebra or the face ring of \(K\). Both approaches produce criteria (combinatorial and algebraic) for realisability of an iterated higher Whitehead product as a nontrivial element of \(\pi_*(\mathcal Z_K)\).











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