We describe Bott towers as sequences of toric manifolds M^k, and identify the omniorientations which correspond to their original construction as toric varieties. We show that the suspension of M^k is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of Thom complexes, and display its complex K-theory as an algebra over the coefficient ring. We extend the results to KO-theory for several families of examples, and compute the effects of the realification homomorphism; these calculations breathe geometric life into Bahri and Bendersky's recent analysis of the Adams Spectral Sequence. By way of application we investigate stably complex structures on M^k, identifying those which arise from omniorientations and those which are almost complex. We conclude with observations on the role of Bott towers in complex cobordism theory.
We carefully present an elementary proof of the well known theorem that each homotopy group (or, in degree zero, pointed set) of the inverse limit of a tower of fibrations maps naturally onto the inverse limit of the homotopy groups (or, in degree zero, pointed sets) of the spaces in the tower, with kernel naturally isomorphic to $\lim^{1}$ of the tower of homotopy groups of one dimension higher.
This mostly expository paper records some basic facts about towers of homotopy fiber sequences. We give a proof that a pairing of towers induces a pairing of associated spectral sequences, for towers of spaces and towers of spectra.
This paper is based on talks I gave in Nagoya and Kinosaki in August of 2003. I survey, from my own perspective, Goodwillie's work on towers associated to continuous functors between topological model categories, and then include a discussion of applications to periodic homotopy as in my work and the work of Arone-Mahowald.
The completion tower of a nonunital commutative ring is a classical construction in commutative algebra. In the setting of structured ring spectra as modeled by algebras over a spectral operad, the analogous construction is the homotopy completion tower. The purpose of this brief note is to show that localization with respect to the Johnson-Wilson spectrum $E(n)$ commutes with the terms of this tower.
We call attention to the intermediate constructions $\T_n F$ in Goodwillie's Calculus of homotopy functors, giving a new model which naturally gives rise to a family of towers filtering the Taylor Tower of a functor. We also establish a surprising equivalence between the homotopy inverse limits of these towers and the homotopy inverse limits of certain cosimplicial resolutions. This equivalence gives a greatly simplified construction for the homotopy inverse limit of the Taylor tower of a functor $F$ under general assumptions.
Goodwillie's homotopy functor calculus constructs a Taylor tower of approximations to F, often a functor from spaces to spaces. Weiss's orthogonal calculus provides a Taylor tower for functors from vector spaces to spaces. In particular, there is a Weiss tower associated to the functor which sends a vector space V to F evaluated at the one-point compactification of V. In this paper, we give a comparison of these two towers and show that when F is analytic the towers agree up to weak equivalence. We include two main applications, one of which gives as a corollary the convergence of the Weiss Ta…
This is a (slightly edited) version of the PhD dissertation of the author, submitted to Brown University in July 2005. We construct a homotopy calculus of functors in the sense of Goodwillie for the categories of rational homotopy theory. More precisely, given a homotopy functor between any of the categories of differential graded vector spaces (DG), reduced differential graded vector spaces, differential graded Lie algebras (DGL), and differential graded coalgebras (DGC), we show that there is an associated approximating "rational Taylor tower" of excisive functors. The fibers in this tower a…
We examine the "homotopy coniveau tower" for a general cohomology theory on smooth k-schemes and give a new proof that the layers of this tower for K-theory agree with motivic cohomology. In addition, the homotopy coniveau tower agrees with Voevodsky's slice tower for $S^1$-spectra, giving a proof of a connectedness conjecture of Voevodsky. The homotopy coniveau tower construction extends to a tower of functors on the Morel-Voevodsky stable homotopy category, and we identify this $P^1$-stable homotopy coniveau tower with Voevodsky's slice filtration for $P^1$-spectra. We also show that the 0th…
We introduce general methods to analyse the Goodwillie tower of the identity functor on a wedge $X \vee Y$ of spaces (using the Hilton-Milnor theorem) and on the cofibre $\mathrm{cof}(f)$ of a map $f: X \rightarrow Y$. We deduce some consequences for $v_n$-periodic homotopy groups: whereas the Goodwillie tower is finite and converges in periodic homotopy when evaluated on spheres (Arone-Mahowald), we show that neither of these statements remains true for wedges and Moore spaces.
We show the strong cohomological rigidity of Hirzebruch surface bundles over Bott manifolds. As a corollary, we have that the strong cohomological rigidity conjecture is true for Bott manifolds of dimension $8$.
Manifold calculus is a form of functor calculus concerned with functors from some category of manifolds to spaces. A weakness in the original formulation is that it is not continuous in the sense that it does not handle well the natural enrichments. In this paper, we correct this by defining an enriched version of manifold calculus which essentially extends the discrete setting. Along the way, we recast the Taylor tower as a tower of homotopy sheafifications. As a spin-off we obtain a natural connection to operads: the limit of the Taylor tower is a certain (derived) space of right module maps…
The main aim of this article is to study the topology of real Bott towers as special and interesting examples of real toric varieties. We first give a presentation of the fundamental group of a real Bott tower and show that the fundamental group is abelian if and only if the real Bott tower is a product of circles. We further prove that the fundamental group of a real Bott tower is always solvable and it is nilpotent if and only if it is abelian. We then describe the cohomology ring of a real Bott tower and also give recursive formulae for the Steifel Whitney classes. We derive combinatorial c…
In this note we compare the fracture squares from genuine equivariant stable homotopy theory and the fracture squares which appear in the Goodwillie tower for the norm functor.
In this note we study the functoriality of the coniveau filtration in motivic homotopy theory via a moving lemma over a base scheme, extending previous works of Levine and Bachmann-Yakerson. The main result is that the motivic stable homotopy category can be modeled on a smaller site, the "smooth-smooth site". The proof is based on a new approach to the purity theorem of Morel-Voevodsky using specialization maps, which turns out to hold even in absence of the $\mathbb{A}^1$-homotopy invariance property. Applications to the homotopy coniveau tower and to higher Chow-Witt groups are given.
To a direct sum of holomorphic line bundles, we can associate two fibrations, whose fibers are, respectively, the corresponding full flag manifold and the corresponding projective space. Iterating these procedures gives, respectively, a flag Bott tower and a generalized Bott tower. It is known that a generalized Bott tower is a toric manifold. However a flag Bott tower is not toric in general but we show that it is a GKM manifold, and we also show that for a given generalized Bott tower we can find the associated flag Bott tower so that the closure of a generic torus orbit in the latter is a b…
Given a left Quillen presheaf of localized model structures, we study the homotopy limit model structure on the associated category of sections. We focus specifically on towers and fibered products (pullbacks) of model categories. As applications we consider Postnikov towers of model categories, chromatic towers of spectra and Bousfield arithmetic squares of spectra. For stable model categories, we show that the homotopy fiber of a stable left Bousfield localization is a stable right Bousfield localization.
We study the connection between the Goodwillie tower of the identity and the lower central series of the loop group on connected spaces. We define the simplicial theory of homotopy n-nilpotent groups. This notion interpolates between infinite loop spaces and loop spaces. We prove that the set-valued algebraic theory obtained by applying $π_0$ is the theory of ordinary n-nilpotent groups and that the Goodwillie tower of a connected space is determined by a certain homotopy left Kan extension. We prove that n-excisive functors of the form $ΩF$ have values in homotopy n-nilpotent groups.
A generalised Postnikov tower for a space $X$ is a tower of principal fibrations with fibres generalised Eilenberg-MacLane spaces, whose inverse limit is weakly homotopy equivalent to $X$. In this paper we give a characterisation of a polyhedral product $Z_K(X,A)$ whose universal cover either admits a generalised Postnikov tower of finite length, or is a homotopy retract of a space admitting such a tower. We also include $p$-local and rational versions of the theorem. We end with a group theoretic application.
We shall introduce a notion of $S^1$-fibred nilBott tower. It is an iterated $S^1$-bundles whose top space is called an $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifold and the $S^1$-bundle of each stage realizes a Seifert construction. The nilBott tower is a generalization of real Bott tower from the viewpoint of fibration. In this note we shall prove that any $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifold is diffeomorphic to an infranilmanifold. According to the group extension of each stage, there are two classes of $S^1$-fibred nilBott manifolds which is defined as finite type or infinite type. We discuss their properties.
The non-equivariant topology of Stiefel manifolds has been studied extensively, culminating in a result of Miller demonstrating that a Stiefel manifold splits stably to a wedge of Thom spaces over Grassmannians. Equivariantly, one can consider spaces of isometries between representations as an analogue to Stiefel manifolds. This concept, however, yields a different theory to the non-equivariant case. We first construct a variation on the theory of the functional calculus before studying the homotopy-theoretic properties of this theory. This allows us to construct the main result; a natural tow…
The classical problem of algebraic models for homotopy types is precisely stated, to our knowledge for the first time. Two different natural statements for this problem are produced, the simplest one being entirely solved by the notion of SSEH-structure, due to the authors. Other tentative solutions, Postnikov towers and E_\infty-chain complexes, are considered and compared with the SSEH-structures. In particular, which looks at least like an unfortunate imprecision in the usual definition of the k-``invariants'' is explained, which implies we seem far from a solution for the ideal statement o…
A Bott tower is an iterated $\CP ^1$-bundle over a point, where each $\CP ^1$-bundle is the projectivization of a rank $2$ decomposable complex vector bundle. For a Bott tower, the filtered cohomology is naturally defined. We show that isomorphism classes of Bott towers are distinguished by their filtered cohomology rings. We even show that any filtered cohomology ring isomorphism between two Bott towers is induced by an isomorphism of the Bott towers.
This work continues the study of a homotopy-theoretic construction of the author inspired by the Bott-Taubes integrals. Bott and Taubes constructed knot invariants by integrating differential forms along the fiber of a bundle over the space of knots. Their techniques were later used by Cattaneo et al. to construct real "Vassiliev-type" cohomology classes in spaces of knots in higher-dimensional Euclidean space. By doing this integration via a Pontrjagin-Thom construction, we constructed cohomology classes in the knot space with arbitrary coefficients. We later showed that a refinement of this …
We construct a Goodwillie tower of categories which interpolates between the category of pointed spaces and the category of spectra. This tower of categories refines the Goodwillie tower of the identity functor in a precise sense. More generally, we construct such a tower for a large class of infinity-categories C. We classify such Goodwillie towers in terms of the derivatives of the identity functor of C. As a particular application we show how this provides a model for the homotopy theory of simply-connected spaces in terms of coalgebras with Tate diagonals. Our classification of Goodwillie …
We study the geometry of Bott towers in the context of toric geometry, describing their associated fans arising from crosspolytopes. We compute the cohomology ring of each stage of the tower, and provide all monomial identities defining related affine toric varieties.
We consider Voevodsky's slice tower for a finite spectrum E in the motivic stable homotopy category over a perfect field k. In case k has finite cohomological dimension (in characteristic two, we also require that k is infinite), we show that the slice tower converges, in that the induced filtration on the bi-graded homotopy sheaves for each term in the tower for E is finite, exhaustive and separated at each stalk. This partially verifies a conjecture of Voevodsky.
In the early 1980's the author proved G.W. Whitehead's conjecture about stable homotopy groups and symmetric products. In the mid 1990's, Arone and Mahowald showed that the Goodwillie tower of the identity had remarkably good properties when specialized to odd dimensional spheres. In this paper we prove that these results are linked, as has been long suspected. We give a state-of-the-art proof of the Whitehead conjecture valid for all primes, and simultaneously show that the identity tower specialized to the circle collapses in the expected sense. Key to our work is that Steenrod algebra modul…
A real Bott tower is obtained as the orbit space of the $n$-torus $T^n$ by the free action of an elementary abelian 2-group $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n$. This paper deals with the classification of 5-dimensional real Bott towers and study certain type of $n$-dimensional real Bott towers ($n\geq 6$).
We study the triangulated subcategories of compact objects in stable homotopy categories such as the homotopy category of spectra, the derived categories of rings, and the stable module categories of Hopf algebras. In the first part of this thesis we use a K-theory recipe of Thomason to classify these subcategories. This recipe when applied to the category of finite p-local spectra gives a refinement of the ``chromatic tower''. This refinement has some interesting consequences. In particular, it gives new evidence to a conjecture of Frank Adams that the thick subcategory C_2 can be generated b…
We study the interaction between the EHP sequence and the Goodwillie tower of the identity evaluated at spheres at the prime 2. Both give rise to spectral sequences (the EHP spectral sequence and the Goodwillie spectral sequence, respectively) which compute the unstable homotopy groups of spheres. We relate the Goodwillie filtration to the P map, and the Goodwillie differentials to the H map. Furthermore, we study an iterated Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence approach to the homotopy of the layers of the Goodwillie tower of the identity on spheres. We show that differentials in these spectra…
The mapping spaces of the $r$-truncated versions of the $E_n$ operads appear as the $r$-th stage of the Taylor tower for long embedding spaces. It has been shown that their rational homotopy groups can be expressed through graph homology in the limit $r\to \infty$. For finite $r$ only a part of the graph homology appears in the homotopy groups of the Taylor tower at this stage, possibly along with some additional unstable homotopy groups. In this paper we study the convergence properties in some more detail. In particular, we provide bounds for the stage $r$ at which the various graph homology…
A Bott tower is the total space of a tower of fibre bundles with base CP^1 and fibres CP^1. Every Bott tower of height n is a smooth projective toric variety whose moment polytope is combinatorially equivalent to an n-cube. A circle action is semifree if it is free on the complement to fixed points. We show that a (quasi)toric manifold (in the sense of Davis-Januszkiewicz) over an n-cube with a semifree circle action and isolated fixed points is a Bott tower. Then we show that every Bott tower obtained in this way is topologically trivial, that is, homeomorphic to a product of 2-spheres. This …
If $B$ is a toric manifold and $E$ is a Whitney sum of complex line bundles over $B$, then the projectivization $P(E)$ of $E$ is again a toric manifold. Starting with $B$ as a point and repeating this construction, we obtain a sequence of complex projective bundles which we call a generalized Bott tower. We prove that if the top manifold in the tower has the same cohomology ring as a product of complex projective spaces, then every fibration in the tower is trivial so that the top manifold is diffeomorphic to the product of complex projective spaces. This gives a supporting evidence to what we…
Complexification, from real connective K-theory to complex connective K-theory, sits in a well-known cofiber sequence between multiplication by eta and a map related to realification. We show how this cofiber sequence factors as one goes up the Postnikov towers of ko and ku. There are 5 distinct cofiber sequences which then repeat under Bott periodicity.
We show Goodwillie's calculus of functors and $n$-geometric $D^{-}$-stacks share similar features by starting to focus on the convergence of Taylor towers for homotopy functors and the fact that $\mathbb{R} F(A) \cong \text{holim} \mathbb{R} F(A_{\leq n})$ for geometric stacks, where $\{ A_{\leq n} \}$ provides a Postnikov tower of some given $A \in s \text{k-Alg}$. From there we show parallel results, such as similar homotopy fibers of connecting maps in towers, as well as polynomial approximations, pointwise approximations and reconstruction theorems for towers.
We import into homotopy theory the algebro-geometric construction of the cotangent space of a geometric point on a scheme. Specializing to the category of spectra local to a Morava $K$-theory of height $d$, we show that this can be used to produce a choice-free model of the determinantal sphere as well as an efficient Picard-graded cellular decomposition of $K(\mathbb Z_p, d+1)$. Coupling these ideas to work of Westerland, we give a "Snaith's theorem" for the Iwasawa extension of the $K(d)$-local sphere.
We establish a $v_1$-periodicity theorem in Ext over the complex-motivic Steenrod algebra. The element $h_1$ of Ext, which detects the homotopy class $η$ in the motivic Adams spectral sequence, is non-nilpotent and therefore generates $h_1$-towers. Our result is that, apart from these $h_1$-towers, $v_1$-periodicity behaves as it does classically.
The space of E-infinity structures on an simplicial operad C is the limit of a tower of fibrations, so its homotopy is the abutment of a Bousfield-Kan fringed spectral sequence. The spectral sequence begins (under mild restrictions) with the stable cohomotopy of the graded right Gamma-module formed by the homotopy groups of C ; the fringe contains an obstruction theory for the existence of E-infinity structures on C. This formulation is very flexible: applications extend beyond structures on classical ring spectra to examples (in references) in motivic homotopy theory.
This belongs to a series of papers devoted to the study of the cohomology of classifying spaces of Lie groupoids. Our aim here is to introduce and study the notion of representation up to homotopy of Lie groupoids, the resulting derived category, and to show that the adjoint representation is well defined as a representation up to homotopy. As an application, we extend Bott's spectral sequence converging to the cohomology of classifying spaces from Lie groups to Lie groupoids.
We study the interplay of the homotopy coniveau tower, the Rost-Schmid complex of a strictly homotopy invariant sheaf, and homotopy modules. For a strictly homotopy invariant sheaf $M$, smooth $k$-scheme $X$ and $q \geqslant 0$ we construct a novel cycle complex $C^*(X, M, q)$ and we prove that in favorable cases, $C^*(X, M, q)$ is equivalent to the homotopy coniveau tower $M^{(q)}(X)$. To do so we establish moving lemmas for the Rost-Schmid complex. As an application we deduce a cycle complex model for Milnor-Witt motivic cohomology. Furthermore we prove that if $M$ is a strictly homotopy inv…
The aim of this short paper is to establish a spectral algebra analog of the Bousfield-Kan "fibration lemma" under appropriate conditions. We work in the context of algebraic structures that can be described as algebras over an operad $\mathcal{O}$ in symmetric spectra. Our main result is that completion with respect to topological Quillen homology (or TQ-completion, for short) preserves homotopy fibration sequences provided that the base and total $\mathcal{O}$-algebras are connected. Our argument essentially boils down to proving that the natural map from the homotopy fiber to its TQ-complet…
A complex projective tower or simply a $\mathbb CP$-tower is an iterated complex projective fibrations starting from a point. In this paper we classify all 6-dimensional $\mathbb CP$-towers up to diffeomorphism, and as a consequence, we show that all such manifolds are cohomologically rigid, i.e., they are completely determined up to diffeomorphism by their cohomology rings. We also show that cohomological rigidity is not valid for 8-dimensional $\mathbb CP$-towers by classifying $\mathbb CP^1$-fibrations over $\mathbb CP^3$ up to diffeomorphism. As a corollary we show that such $\mathbb CP$-t…
We describe Taylor towers for spaces of knots arising from Goodwillie-Weiss calculus of the embedding functor and extend the configuration space integrals of Bott and Taubes from spaces of knots to the stages of the towers. We show that certain combinations of integrals, indexed by trivalent diagrams, yield cohomology classes of the stages of the tower, just as they do for ordinary knots.
We construct a calculus of functors in the spirit of orthogonal calculus, which is designed to study "functors with reality" such as the Real classifying space functor, $BU_\mathbb{R}(-)$. The calculus produces a Taylor tower, the $n$-th layer of which is classified by a spectrum with an action of $C_2 \ltimes U(n)$. We further give model categorical considerations, producing a zig-zag of Quillen equivalences between spectra with an action of $C_2 \ltimes U(n)$ and a model structure on the category of input functors which captures the homotopy theory of the $n$-th layer of the Taylor tower.
We construct cohomology classes in the space of knots by considering a bundle over this space and "integrating along the fiber" classes coming from the cohomology of configuration spaces using a Pontrjagin-Thom construction. The bundle we consider is essentially the one considered by Bott and Taubes, who integrated differential forms along the fiber to get knot invariants. By doing this "integration" homotopy-theoretically, we are able to produce integral cohomology classes. We then show how this integration is compatible with the homology operations on the space of long knots, as studied by B…
A torus manifold is a closed smooth manifold of dimension $2n$ having an effective smooth $T^n = (S^1)^n$-action with non-empty fixed points. Petrie \cite{petrie:1973} has shown that any homotopy equivalence between a complex projective space $\CP^n$ and a torus manifold homotopy equivalent to $\CP^n$ preserves their Pontrjagin classes. A \emph{generalized Bott manifold} is a closed smooth manifold obtained as the total space of an iterated complex projective space bundles over a point, where each fibration is a projectivization of the Whitney sum of a finite many complex line bundles. For ins…
We show that there is a homotopy cofiber sequence of spectra relating Carlsson's deformation K-theory of a group G to its "deformation representation ring," analogous to the Bott periodicity sequence relating connective K-theory to ordinary homology. We then apply this to study simultaneous similarity of unitary matrices.
Given CW complexes X and Y, let map(X,Y) denote the space of continuous functions from X to Y with the compact open topology. The space map(X,Y) need not have the homotopy type of a CW complex. Here the results of an extensive investigation of various necessary and various sufficient conditions for map(X,Y) to have the homotopy type of a CW complex are exhibited. The results extend all previously known results on this topic. Moreover, appropriate converses are given for the previously known sufficient conditions. It is shown that this difficult question is related to well known problems in alg…
