group cohomology, nonabelian group cohomology, Lie group cohomology
cohomology with constant coefficients / with a local system of coefficients
differential cohomology
algebraic topology – application of higher algebra and higher category theory to the study of (stable) homotopy theory
The Massey product of length is a certain -ary products on the cohomology ring of an A-infinity algebra (in particular a dg-algebra).
Roughly, Massey Products are to cohomology as Toda Brackets are to homotopy.
Somewhat more fully, while Toda brackets are relations between mapping space groups and chains of maps , and generalizing nullhomotopy of composition, Massey products are a relation between cohomology groups and , generalizing the vanishing of pairwise cup products.
The case is straight-forward enough: given three homogeneous classes such that , there are (various) choices of cochains with and . The Massey triple product is the set of sums , where the sign is chosen for cocyclicity.
Let such that their triple Massey product exists. Then the cup product of with the triple Massey product is independent of the ambiguity in the Massey products and equals the cup product of with and with the Steenrod square of of degree :
(Taylor 11, slide 10, following Milgram 68)
For a dg-algebra, its chain homology inherits an A-infinity algebra structure by Kadeishvili's theorem. Then for every the -ary -product on elements is given, up to a sign, by the Massey product .
For this is due to (Stasheff). For general this appears as (LPWZ, theorem 3.1).
David Kraines, Massey higher products, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society Vol. 124, No. 3 (Sep., 1966), pp. 431-449 (jstor)
Edward J. O’Neill, On Massey products, Pacific J. Math. Volume 76, Number 1 (1978), 123-127. (EUCLID)
Stanley Kochmann, section 5.4 of Bordism, Stable Homotopy and Adams Spectral Sequences, AMS 1996
R. James Milgram, Steenrod squares and higher Massey products, Bol. Soc. Mat. Mexicana (2) 13 (1968), 32–57.MR0263074 (web)
Laurence Taylor, Massey Triple Products, Princeton 2011 (pdf)
See also
The relation of Massey products to A-infinity algebra structures is in Chapter 12 of
for , and for general in Theorem 3.1 and Corollary A.5 of
as well as from item 1.4 on in
and sections 9.4.10 to 9.4.12 of
Notice that the definition of Massey product on top of p.282 of Vallette-Loday, depends on choices of which don’t appear in the notation. Then lemma 9.4.11 talks about a particular choice of which is made in the body of the proof. The actual statement of the lemma only can be deduced after reading the proof. It then says that for these particular choices of a,b the said equality holds. (See this MO discussion).
Massey products in ordinary differential cohomology/Deligne cohomology are discussed in
Wenger, Massey products in Deligne cohomology.
C. Deninger, Higher order operations in Deligne cohomology, Inventiones Math. 122 N1 (1995).
Alexander Schwarzhaupt, Massey products in Deligne-Beilinson cohomology (web, pdf).
Daniel Grady, Hisham Sati, Massey products in differential cohomology via stacks, J. Homotopy Relat. Struct. 13 (2017) 169-223 (arXiv:1510.06366, doi:10.1007/s40062-017-0178-y).
Last revised on February 27, 2021 at 11:11:47. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.