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There is a brief entry at bar construction together with a blog link
There is some discussion of the bar-cobar adjointness as it relates to twisting cochains, at that entry.
Here we will concentrate on the bar-cobar adjointness itself and start exploring the links with other parts of differential algebra.
One of the earliest examples of a pair of adjoint functors studied in algebraic topology was that giving the relationship between the functors for reduced suspension and based loop space. If we consider a pointed connected topological space , then its reduced suspension is obtained by taking the cylinder and identifying the subspace to a point. (Think of crushing the two ends of the cylinder and the line through the base point to a point.) This can also be thought of as forming the smash product of the circle with .
Adjoint to is the based loop space functor: is the space of pointed maps from to . This has a monoid structure (up to homotopy) given by concatenation of loops. (Back in , we have a comonoid structure with respect to the pointed coproduct as described at interval object. This in some sense is ‘subdivision as an inverse for composition’.)
(perhaps: Picture to go here?)
Using ordinary (co)homology to study spaces such as CW-complexes, we naturally use the complexes of (cellular) chains on spaces. The structure of chains on the suspension is easy to work out using the obvious cellular structure, but that on the loop space is much harder as is given the compact-open topology and only has the homotopy type of a CW-complex, so no nice cellular structure is given us ‘on a plate’. The idea is thus to start with a chain complex model, , for a CW-complex, , (usually the complex of cellular chains on ), and we try to construct from a ‘model’ for the chain complex of the loop space of . Adams’ cobar construction was such a method (see below). This was adjoint to a bar construction defined by Eilenberg and MacLane.
Both directions use an abstract algebraic model of concatenation of paths and so their construction is linked to that of free monoids, and through those to monads, operads and related abstract machinery to handle concatenation and its higher categorical analogues in categorical contexts.
The chain complex has a rich coalgebraic structure induced by a cellular diagonal approximation on so the cobar construction will start with a dg-coalgebra as ‘input’ and as output we will hope for both a coalgebra structure (reflecting the chain coalgebra idea) and an algebra structure (coming from modelling the concatenation of loops). We therefore might hope for, and in fact do get, a differential graded Hopf algebra.
Going the other way, we start with a differential graded algebra and use ‘coconcatenation’ or ‘subdivision’ to get a coalgebra structure. In fact, once again, this is a Hopf algebra.
These topologically motivated constructions can be applied in much greater generality as we will see both here and elsewhere:
(due originally Eilenberg-MacLane) Remember this goes from ‘algebras’ to Hopf algebras in general.
Let be a commutative, augmented differential -graded algebra, , .
The bar construction is given by
where
is the commutative differential graded Hopf algebra generated by , being the suspension (shift, translation, etc) operator discussed in graded vector spaces,
, where
and
with .
Note
the image of a 1-connected cdga is a connected commutative Hopf algebra.
The construction uses the suspension operator on the graded vector spaces. This mirrors the reduced suspension at the cell complex level.
The construction uses a tensor algebra construction. This from one point of view handles the formal concatenation aspect, but has also a rich structure of a coalgebraic structure with reduced diagonal, given by
(see differential graded coalgebra).
This can be interpreted as looking at how a formal concatenation can be ‘subdivided’ into its various parts.
(due to J. F. Adams, see Felix-Halperin0Thomas 92)
We define a functor:
so essentially from cocommutative differential graded coalgebras to cocommutative differential graded Hopf algebras (with frills attached in the way of coaugmentations, etc).
Let be a cocommutative differential -graded coaugmented coalgeba:
The Cobar construction is the cocommutative pre-dgha defined by
Here
is the cocommutative Hopf algebra generated by , as before(in differential graded coalgebra) is the cokernel of the coaugmentation, )
and
with ;
The image of a 1-connected cdgc is a connected cocommutative dgha.
If is of finite type, is isomorphic to as a differential -graded Hopf algebra.
If is not (graded) commutative, the differential of does not respect the shuffle product on ; thus becomes merely a differential -graded coalgebra. Similarly if is not (graded) cocommutative is merely a differential -graded algebra.
In particular, let
be the category of augmented differential graded algebras, ().
, the category of connected differential graded coalgebras,
then the Bar and Cobar constructions yield functors
(Husemoller-Moore-Stasheff)
is right adjoint to .
For any objects in , and of , the natural adjunction morphisms
are weak equivalences / quasi-isomorphisms.
These latter morphisms are defined by
is the zero mapping on and the natural isomorphism on .
is the unique lifting of
The source used for the above was
This was augmented with material from
See also:
Review:
Dev Sinha, Section 1 in: Koszul duality in algebraic topology - an historical perspective, J. Homotopy Relat. Struct. (2013) 8: 1 (arXiv:1001.2032)
Mathieu Anel, André Joyal, On the bar-cobar duality for algebras and operads, slides 2012, pdf
Mathieu Anel, André Joyal, Sweedler theory for (co)algebras and the bar-cobar constructions, arXiv:1309.6952
Kathryn Hess, The cobar construction: a modern perspective, lectures 2007, pdf
Identifying the cobar construction on singular chains on a topological space with the dg-algebra of chains on its loop space:
John Frank Adams, On the cobar construction, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 42 7 (1956) 409–412 [doi:10.1073/pnas.42.7.409]
Manuel Rivera, Mahmoud Zeinalian, Cubical rigidification, the cobar construction, and the based loop space, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 18 (2018) 3789-3820 [arXiv:1612.04801, doi:10.2140/agt.2018.18.3789]
Manuel Rivera, Adams’ cobar construction revisited, Documenta Math. 27 (2022) 1213-1223 [arxiv:1910.08455]
Generalization of the bar-cobar constructions to dg-Hopf algebras:
Benoit Fresse, The universal Hopf operads of the bar construction (arXiv:math/0701245)
Murray Gerstenhaber, Alexander Voronov, Section 3.2 of: Homotopy G-algebras and moduli space operad, Internat. Math. Research Notices (1995) 141-153 (arXiv:hep-th/9409063)
Justin Young, Brace bar-cobar duality (arXiv:1309.2820)
Last revised on December 6, 2023 at 10:23:43. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.