Related papers: Strings and the stable cohomology of mapping class…
We study the string topology of a closed oriented Riemannian manifold M. We describe a compact moduli space of diagrams, and show how the cellular chain complex of this space gives algebraic operations on the singular chains of the free…
In this paper we study the topology of the cobordism category of open and closed strings. This is a 2-category in which the objects are compact one-manifolds whose boundary components are labeled by an indexing set (the set of "D-branes"),…
We show that the mod $\ell$ cohomology of any finite group of Lie type in characteristic $p$ different from $\ell$ admits the structure of a module over the mod $\ell$ cohomology of the free loop space of the classifying space $BG$ of the…
Let $\MS_g$ be the moduli space of stable holomorphic vector bundles of rank 2 and fixed determinant of odd degree over a smooth complex projective curve of genus $g$. This paper proves various properties of the rational cohomology ring…
We study the rational homology of the Deligne--Mumford compactification $\overline{\mathcal M}_{g,n}$ of the moduli space of stable curves via a family of Morse functions, namely the $\text{sys}_T$ functions. Exploiting the geometric and…
We prove an analogue of the Madsen-Weiss theorem for high dimensional manifolds. For example, we explicitly describe the ring of characteristic classes of smooth fibre bundles whose fibres are connected sums of g copies of S^n x S^n, in the…
In these lecture notes we discuss a body of work in which Morse theory is used to construct various homology and cohomology operations. In the classical setting of algebraic topology this is done by constructing a moduli space of graph…
The importance of the fusion relation of loops was recognized in the context of spin structures on the loop space by Stolz and Teichner and further developed by Waldorf. On a spin manifold M the equivalence classes of `fusive' spin…
Infinite-dimensional Grassmannian manifold contains moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces of all genera. This well known fact leads to a conjecture that non-perturbative string theory can be formulated in terms of Grassmannian. We present new…
We study categories of d-dimensional cobordisms from the perspective of Tillmann and Galatius-Madsen-Tillmann-Weiss. There is a category $C_\theta$ of closed smooth (d-1)-manifolds and smooth d-dimensional cobordisms, equipped with…
Motivated by the operad built from moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, we consider a general class of operads in the category of spaces that satisfy certain homological stability conditions. We prove that such operads are infinite loop space…
We study the equivariant generalization of topological strings on toric manifolds, focusing in particular on defining the contributions of constant maps in the genus expansion of the partition function. This approach regularizes the…
Given a graded $E_1$-module over an $E_2$-algebra in spaces, we construct an augmented semi-simplicial space up to higher coherent homotopy over it, called its canonical resolution, whose graded connectivity yields homological stability for…
A conjecture of Mumford predicts a complete set of relations between the generators of the cohomology ring of the moduli space of rank 2 semi-stable sheaves with fixed odd degree determinant on a smooth, projective curve of genus at least…
The moduli space of stable bundles of rank 2 and degree 1 on a Riemann surface has rational cohomology generated by the so-called universal classes. The work of Baranovsky, King-Newstead, Siebert-Tian and Zagier provided a complete set of…
In string field theory an infinitesimal background deformation is implemented as a canonical transformation whose hamiltonian function is defined by moduli spaces of punctured Riemann surfaces having one special puncture. We show that the…
We apply a version of the Chas-Sullivan-Cohen-Jones product on the higher loop homology of a manifold in order to compute the homology of the spaces of continuous and holomorphic maps of the Riemann sphere into a complex projective space.…
We study the homotopy type of the harmonic compactification of the moduli space of a 2-cobordism S with one outgoing boundary component, or equivalently of the space of Sullivan diagrams of type S on one circle. Our results are of two…
We give definitions of moduli spaces of framed, r-Spin and Pin surfaces. We apply earlier work of the author to show that each of these moduli spaces exhibits homological stability, and we identify the stable integral homology with that of…
By the work of Harer, the reduced homology of the complex of curves is a fundamental cohomological object associated to all torsion free finite index subgroups of the mapping class group. We call this homology group the Steinberg module of…