English

Effectual Topological Complexity

Algebraic Topology 2021-02-16 v1

Abstract

We introduce the effectual topological complexity (ETC) of a GG-space XX. This is a GG-equivariant homotopy invariant sitting in between the effective topological complexity of the pair (X,G)(X,G) and the (regular) topological complexity of the orbit space X/GX/G. We study ETC for spheres and surfaces with antipodal involution, obtaining a full computation in the case of the torus. This allows us to prove the vanishing of twice the non-trivial obstruction responsible for the fact that the topological complexity of the Klein bottle is 4. In addition, this gives a counterexample to the possibility -- suggested in Pave\v{s}i\'c's work on the topological complexity of a map -- that ETC of (X,G)(X,G) would agree with Farber's TC(X)TC(X) whenever the projection map XX/GX\to X/G is finitely sheeted. We conjecture that ETC of spheres with antipodal action recasts the Hopf invariant one problem, and describe (conjecturally optimal) effectual motion planners.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.07249,
  title  = {Effectual Topological Complexity},
  author = {Natalia Cadavid-Aguilar and Jesús González and Bárbara Gutiérrez and Cesar A. Ipanaque-Zapata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.07249},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:09:01.062Z