This survey offers an overview of an on-going project on uniform symmetries in abstract stable homotopy theories. This project has calculational, foundational, and representation-theoretic aspects, and key features of this emerging field on abstract representation theory include the following. First, generalizing the classical focus on representations over fields, it is concerned with the study of representations over rings, differential-graded algebras, ring spectra, and in more general abstract stable homotopy theories. Second, restricting attention to specific shapes, it offers an explanation of the axioms of triangulated categories, higher triangulations, and monoidal triangulations. This has led to fairly general results concerning additivity of traces. Third, along similar lines of thought it suggests the development of abstract cubical homotopy theory as an additional calculational toolkit. An interesting symmetry in this case is given by a global form of Serre duality. Fourth, abstract tilting equivalences give rise to non-trivial elements in spectral Picard groupoids and hence contribute to their calculation. And, finally, it stimulates a deeper digression of the notion of stability itself, leading to various characterizations and relative versions of stability.
In this paper we establish new characterizations of stable derivators, thereby obtaining additional interpretations of the passage from (pointed) topological spaces to spectra and, more generally, of the stabilization. We show that a derivator is stable if and only if homotopy finite limits and homotopy finite colimits commute, and there are variants for sufficiently finite Kan extensions. As an additional reformulation, a derivator is stable if and only if it admits a zero object and if partial cone and partial fiber morphisms commute on squares.
This is an introduction to the study of abstract homotopy theory by means of model categories and $(\infty,1)$-categories. The only prerequisites are very basic general topology and abstract algebra. None categorical background is needed. The final objective is to show that classical homotopy theory for topological spaces can be more naturally understood in terms of categorical language.
We show that a derivator is stable if and only if homotopy finite limits and homotopy finite colimits commute, if and only if homotopy finite limit functors have right adjoints, and if and only if homotopy finite colimit functors have left adjoints. These characterizations generalize to an abstract notion of "stability relative to a class of functors", which includes in particular pointedness, semiadditivity, and ordinary stability. To prove them, we develop the theory of derivators enriched over monoidal left derivators and weighted homotopy limits and colimits therein.
We prove that for any homotopy type $X$, there is an abstract elementary class $\mathcal{C}$, with joint embedding, almagamation and no maximal models such that the classifying space realizes the homotopy type $X$. We provide a few explicit examples.
Triangulations and higher triangulations axiomatize the calculus of derived cokernels when applied to strings of composable morphisms. While there are no cubical versions of (higher) triangulations, in this paper we use coherent diagrams to develop some aspects of a rich cubical calculus. Applied to the models in the background, this enhances the typical examples of triangulated and tensor-triangulated categories. The main players are the cardinality filtration of n-cubes, the induced interpolation between cocartesian and strongly cocartesian n-cubes, and the yoga of iterated cone construction…
We show that certain tilting results for quivers are formal consequences of stability, and as such are part of a formal calculus available in any abstract stable homotopy theory. Thus these results are for example valid over arbitrary ground rings, for quasi-coherent modules on schemes, in the differential-graded context, in stable homotopy theory and also in the equivariant, motivic or parametrized variant thereof. In further work, we will continue developing this calculus and obtain additional abstract tilting results. Here, we also deduce an additional characterization of stability, based o…
We prove the existence of minimal models a la Sullivan for operads with nontrivial arity zero. So up-to-homotopy algebras with strict units are just operad algebras over these minimal models. As an application, we give another proof of the formality of the unitary n-little disks operad over the rationals.
Homotopy coherence has a considerable history, albeit also by other names. For this volume highlighting symmetries, the appropriate use is: Homotopy coherence of representations, at one time known as strong homotopy representations. We provide a brief semi-historical survey providing some links that may not be common knowledge.
We show that variants of the classical reflection functors from quiver representation theory exist in any abstract stable homotopy theory, making them available for example over arbitrary ground rings, for quasi-coherent modules on schemes, in the differential-graded context, in stable homotopy theory as well as in the equivariant, motivic, and parametrized variant thereof. As an application of these equivalences we obtain abstract tilting results for trees valid in all these situations, hence generalizing a result of Happel. The main tools introduced for the construction of these reflection f…
Informally, an orbifold is a smooth space whose points may have finitely many internal symmetries. Formally, however, the notion of orbifold has been presented in a number of different guises -- from Satake's V-manifolds to Moerdijk and Pronk's proper étale groupoids -- which do not on their face resemble the informal definition. The reason for this divergence between formalism and intuition is that the points of spaces cannot have internal symmetries in traditional, set-level foundations. The extra data of these symmetries must be carried around and accounted for throughout the theory. More d…
Homotopy type theory is a formal language for doing abstract homotopy theory -- the study of identifications. But in unmodified homotopy type theory, there is no way to say that these identifications come from identifying the path-connected points of a space. In other words, we can do abstract homotopy theory, but not algebraic topology. Shulman's Real Cohesive HoTT remedies this issue by introducing a system of modalities that relate the spatial structure of types to their homotopical structure. In this paper, we develop a theory of modal fibrations for a general modality, and apply it in par…
We generalize the construction of reflection functors from classical representation theory of quivers to arbitrary small categories with freely attached sinks or sources. These reflection morphisms are shown to induce equivalences between the corresponding representation theories with values in arbitrary stable homotopy theories, including representations over fields, rings or schemes as well as differential-graded and spectral representations. Specializing to representations over a field and to specific shapes, this recovers derived equivalences of Happel for finite, acyclic quivers. However,…
This book introduces a new context for global homotopy theory, i.e., equivariant homotopy theory with universal symmetries. Many important equivariant theories naturally exist not just for a particular group, but in a uniform way for all groups in a specific class. Prominent examples are equivariant stable homotopy, equivariant $K$-theory or equivariant bordism. Global equivariant homotopy theory studies such uniform phenomena, i.e., the adjective `global' refers to simultaneous and compatible actions of all compact Lie groups. We give a self-contained treatment of unstable and stable global h…
This paper continues investigations in "synthetic homotopy theory": the use of homotopy type theory to give machine-checked proofs of constructions from homotopy theory We present a mechanized proof of the Blakers-Massey connectivity theorem, a result relating the higher-dimensional homotopy groups of a pushout type (roughly, a space constructed by gluing two spaces along a shared subspace) to those of the components of the pushout. This theorem gives important information about the pushout type, and has a number of useful corollaries, including the Freudenthal suspension theorem, which has be…
We study generalized symmetries in a simplified arena in which the usual quantum field theories of physics are replaced with topological field theories and the smooth structure with which the symmetry groups of physics are usually endowed is forgotten. Doing so allows many questions of physical interest to be answered using the tools of homotopy theory. We study both global and gauge symmetries, as well as `t Hooft anomalies, which we show fall into one of two classes. Our approach also allows some insight into earlier work on symmetries (generalized or not) of topological field theories.
We introduce a new `geometric realization' of an (abstract) simplicial complex, inspired by probability theory. This space (and its completion) is a metric space, which has the right (weak) homotopy type, and which can be compared with the usual geometric realization through a natural map, which has probabilistic meaning : it associates to a random variable its probability mass function. This `probability map' function is proved to be a (Serre) fibration and a (weak) homotopy equivalence.
We study the representation theory of Dynkin quivers of type A in abstract stable homotopy theories, including those associated to fields, rings, schemes, differential-graded algebras, and ring spectra. Reflection functors, (partial) Coxeter functors, and Serre functors are defined in this generality and these equivalences are shown to be induced by universal tilting modules, certain explicitly constructed spectral bimodules. In fact, these universal tilting modules are spectral refinements of classical tilting complexes. As a consequence we obtain split epimorphisms from the spectral Picard g…
This expository paper introduces several ideas in chromatic homotopy theory around Morava's extraordinary E-theories. In particular, we construct various moduli problems closely related to Lubin-Tate deformation theory and study their symmetries. These symmetries are then used in conjunction with the Hopkins-Kuhn-Ravenel character theory to provide formulas for the power operations and the stabilizer group action on the E-cohomology of a finite group.
Coherent strings of composable morphisms play an important role in various important constructions in abstract stable homotopy theory (for example algebraic K-theory or higher Toda brackets) and in the representation theory of finite dimensional algebras (as representations of Dynkin quivers of type A). In a first step we will prove a strong comparison result relating composable strings of morphisms and coherent diagrams on cubes with support on a path from the initial to the final object. We observe that both structures are equivalent (by passing to higher analogues of mesh categories) to dis…
We give a pedagogical introduction to $L_\infty$-algebras and their uses in organising the symmetries and dynamics of classical field theories, as well as of the conventional noncommutative gauge theories that arise as low-energy effective field theories in string theory. We review recent developments which formulate field theories with braided gauge symmetries as a new means of overcoming several obstacles in the standard noncommutative theories, such as the restrictions on gauge algebras and matter fields. These theories can be constructed by using techniques from Drinfel'd twist deformation…
The simplicial LS-category of a finite abstract simplicial complex is a new invariant of the strong homotopy type, defined in purely combinatorial terms, that generalizes to arbitrary simplicial complexes the well known notion of arboricity of a graph, and that allows to develop all the machinery of algebraic topology which is costumary in the classical theory of Lusternik-Schnirelmann category.
