Infinity-operadic foundations for embedding calculus
Abstract
Motivated by applications to spaces of embeddings and automorphisms of manifolds, we consider a tower of -categories of truncated right-modules over a unital -operad . We study monoidality and naturality properties of this tower, identify its layers, describe the difference between the towers as varies, and generalise these results to the level of Morita -categories. Applied to the -framed -operad, this extends Goodwillie-Weiss' embedding calculus and its layer identification to the level of bordism categories. Applied to other variants of the -operad, it yields new versions of embedding calculus, such as one for topological embeddings, based on , or one similar to Boavida de Brito-Weiss' configuration categories, based on . In addition, we prove a delooping result in the context of embedding calculus, establish a convergence result for topological embedding calculus, improve upon the smooth convergence result of Goodwillie, Klein, and Weiss, and deduce an Alexander trick for homology 4-spheres.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.10991,
title = {Infinity-operadic foundations for embedding calculus},
author = {Manuel Krannich and Alexander Kupers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.10991},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
98 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Journal of Topology