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In topology, the fundamental theorem of covering spaces asserts that for a locally path-connected and semi-locally simply-connected topological space, then the functor given by sending a covering space over to its monodromy permutation groupoid representation of the fundamental groupoid of
is an equivalence of categories between the category of covering spaces and that of permutation groupoid representations of . This means that there exists a functor the other way around
which is an inverse functor up to natural isomorphism. This functor “reconstructs” a covering space from a permutation representation of the fundamental groupoid, such that the monodromy of is naturally isomorphic to the original representation .
We give several equivalent discussions:
An Elementary description using just basic point-set topology;
A Description via Coends using category theoretic tools.
The following is a description of the reconstruction in terms of elementary point-set topology.
Let
Consider the disjoint union set of all the sets appearing in this representation
For an open subset which is path-connected and for which every element of the fundamental group becomes trivial under , and for with consider the subset
The collection of these defines a base for a topology (prop. below). Write for the corresponding topology. Then
is a topological space. It canonically comes with the function
Finally, for
a homomorphism of permutation representations, there is the evident induced function
The construction in def. is well defined and yields a covering space of .
Moreover, the construction yields a homomorphism of covering spaces.
First to see that we indeed have a topology, we need to check (by this prop.) that every point is contained in some base element, and that every point in the intersection of two base elements has a base neighbourhood that is still contained in that intersection.
So let be a point. By the assumption that is semi-locally simply connected? there exists an open neighbourhood such that every loop in on is contractible in . By the assumption that is locally path-connected topological space, this contains an open neighbourhood which is path connected. As every subset of , it still has the property that every loop in based on is contractible as a loop in . Now let be any point over , then it is contained in the base open .
The argument for the base open neighbourhoods contained in intersections is similar.
Then we need to see that is a continuous function. Since taking pre-images preserves unions (this prop.), and since by semi-local simply connectedness every neighbourhood contains an open that labels a base open, it is sufficient to see that is a base open. But by the very assumption on , there is a unique morphism in from any point to any other point in , so that applied to these paths establishes a bijection of sets
thus exhibiting as a union of base opens.
Finally we need to see that this continuous function is a covering projection, hence that every point has a neighbourhood such that . But this is again the case for those all whose loops are contractible in , by the above identification via , and these exist around every point by semi-local simply-connetedness of .
This shows that is a covering space. It remains to see that is a homomorphism of covering spaces. Now by construction it is immediate that this is a function over , in that this diagram commutes:
So it only remains to see that is a continuous function. So consider a base open of . By naturality of its pre-image under is
and hence a union of base opens.
The following is a description of the reconstruction functor in terms of tolls from category theory.
Given a space , let be retopologized with the discrete topology, and consider the pullback in Top of the path space to the product space :
Let be the quotient space of by the equivalence relation “homotopy relative to the boundary”. We can think of as a sum of spaces
fibered in the obvious way over (the set of all basepoints ), where is the space of paths in which begin at , modulo homotopy-rel-boundary. The space can be thought of the universal covering space over the connected component of a point , considered as a space based at .
We have a span
with an obvious (contravariant) composition action of the fundamental groupoid , itself regarded as a span
with a monad structure in the bicategory of spans. The action gives a map
of spans from to .
Now suppose given an object of , i.e., a covariant action of the fundamental groupoid, that is to say a span equipped with an action of the monad in . The data of a right-handed action on and the left-handed action on gives rise to a two-sided bar construction
which here is a simplicial object in the category of spans from to , whose two face maps from degree 1 to degree 0 take the form:
The coequalizer of this pair provides a canonical augmentation of the two-sided bar construction, and may be called the tensor product
(the seemingly opposite placement of the two tensor factors, as compared against the span constructions above, is simply an artifact of the discrepancy between diagrammatic order of composition, and the traditional order in which right actions are covariant and left actions contravariant).
As a span from to , that is as a bundle over , this tensor product is indeed a covering space over , assuming that is locally connected and semi-locally simply connected. Finally, the functor
is under these conditions quasi-inverse to the fiber functor
and thus establishes the equivalence of categories known as the fundamental theorem of covering spaces.
An abstract way of considering the functor is that it is obtained by homming:
and this forces its left adjoint to be given by the tensor product construction described above.
As a special case, consider the permutation representation given by the discrete fibration
David Roberts: shouldn’t such a discrete fibration then give rise to a functor ? If you mean , then this could probably be described as the total tangent groupoid, which is the action groupoid for the action of on itself.
Todd Trimble: I didn’t make myself clear then. Recall that if is an internal category in a category (with in this discussion), then one defines by taking its objects to be internal discrete fibrations, defined as arrows equipped with the data of an action by the internal category , considered as a monoid in spans from to . (This is a standard usage of the term “discrete fibration”; see Johnstone’s Topos Theory for instance.) Looking over this again, I guess I really should have had , and here means the underlying set of . But hopefully my meaning is now clear.
David Roberts: Yes, I see now.
(as a span from to ) equipped with the obvious (covariant) action of the monad (as a span from to ). This is essentially the “regular representation” of the fundamental groupoid. The tensor product of the previous section,
is a way of realizing the universal covering space over .
Here is a way of thinking of this construction which links it to the description of universal bundles by Roberts and Schreiber, which is based on considering tangent spaces of the fundamental groupoid. If the fundamental groupoid is connected, its universal bundle (as a fibration of groupoids) may be realized as the “tangent groupoid at ” or slice
for a chosen basepoint . Note that this slice groupoid is the pullback
with the groupoid . This is then a groupoid over by the restriction of .
Since the set of arrows of is obtained as a quotient of the set of paths in , it inherits naturally a topology (a quotient of the compact-open topology on ) which, together with the given topology on , makes a topological groupoid. Then we recover the universal covering space (I prefer this notation for the 1-connected cover, rather than the usual , because it generalises to for -connected covers - DR) over by pulling back along the functor , where we consider as a topological groupoid with only identity arrows. The assumptions on the topology of mean that is a locally trivial groupoid? with discrete hom-spaces, which implies that is a locally trivial bundle with discrete fibres. Local path-connectedness implies that it is locally trivial, and the local condition on holds if and only if the fibres are discrete - this last result is due to Daniel Bliss.
Another way to consider the topological conditions on is to realise that , with its inherited topology, is equivalent to a topologically discrete groupoid (in some appropriate localisation of the 2-category of topological groupoids) if and only if is locally path-connected and semi-locally simply-connected. Otherwise one has to consider the pro-homotopy 1-type of , as in the theory of algebraic fundamental groups (recall that varieties with appropriate topologies - e.g Zariski - are topologically badly behaved).
David Roberts: Is there a prodiscrete completion of a topological groupoid? Maybe we need to assume it is locally trivial, so it is weakly equivalent (in the said localised 2-category) to a groupoid enriched in , considered as being internal to . We could then talk about quotients by wide subgroupoids being topologically discrete. Or even quotients being discrete and having finite Leinster cardinality?? Hmm…
In this analysis, the universal covering space of (path-connected) is retrieved as the quotient of the space of paths which start at the basepoint , modulo homotopy-rel-boundary; the projection to takes a class of a path to its terminal point . This last description is what one would find in any textbook on algebraic topology dealing with covering spaces. This covering space is, strictly speaking, universal among connected covering spaces
More generally, if is a set of basepoints (Thanks, Ronnie Brown! - DR), we can form the pullback
which is again a groupoid over by restriction of . Then pullback of along the inclusion is a covering space which is the sum
of connected, 1-connected covering spaces based at the points in . Thus for not-necessarily-connected , taking such that it intersects each component of once we can get a universal covering space of (universal among covering spaces that induce isomophisms ).
This construction is functorlal (for general ), since a map of pairs (remember we are giving the discrete topology, not the subspace topology) induces a functor of (topological) groupoids , which by universality of the pulbacks in the above construction gives a map
covering the given map .
The dependence on basepoints is of course spurious; we can make this explicit by considering the colimit obtained by pasting together the universal covering spaces along isomorphisms induced by paths . But this is in effect how our tensor product construction of the universal covering space works: is precisely the sum
which can be viewed as a topological span from to . The fundamental groupoid acts contravariantly on this sum, and the tensor product
is the same thing as the coequalizer of the pair of arrows
in , where one arrow is projection and the other is given by the action of pulling back along classes of paths; this coequalizer is a precise description of the pasting colimit alluded to above. It should be noted that this coequaliser is isomorphic to the covering space when has one point in each component of , but the description as the tensor product is a priori functorial without reference to a set of basepoints.
David Roberts: I think, though, due to the lifting theorems for covering spaces, that given a map and basepoint sets , that are not necessarily preserved by , there should be a unique lift of to anyway. This would also make this construction independent, up isomorphism, of the choice of basepoints and probably also functorial.
David Roberts: It won’t be functorial - the lift referred to isn’t unique. The up-to-isomorphism is a non-canonical isomorphism.
(David or Urs: please feel free to sprinkle your own sugar over this, by adapting or even copying what David wrote below based on your paper.)
(David Roberts: unless someone feels the discussion below is essential, it can be deleted.)
David Roberts: My personal favourite way of doing this is to topologise the fundamental groupoid, then form the following strict pullback of topological groupoids
where is a chosen basepoint and is the tangent groupoid at the object . This links the ideas that the tangent groupoid is the contractible cover of a groupoid, that the fundamental groupoid is the 1-type of a space and the Whitehead construction of connected covers (pull back the path-fibration along the inclusion of a space into the appropriate Postnikov section).
The topology on the fundamental groupoid can either be constructed with the assumption that is locally path-connected and semi-locally simply-connected, or be given the quotient topology from the free path space . With this inherited topology, the fundamental groupoid is equivalent (in the bicategory of topological groupoids and anafunctors) to the same groupoid considered with the discrete topology if and only if satisfies the usual conditions for the universal covering space to exist. Thus even when is topologised, it still represents a 1-type for nice . One thing which interests me, even though I have no idea about how to approach it, is how for general the topologised fundamental groupoid can be considered as a pro-homotopy type, that is, the limit of discrete groupoids, taken in the appropriate (bi)category of topological groupoids.
I would like see several expositions of the construction of the universal covering space, since they illustrate different ideas. They seem tautologously related, but things show a bit more of the differences when one passes to bigroupoids.
The universal covering space is
the source-fibre (at a basepoint) of the topologised fundamental groupoid
the pullback of the tangent groupoid as described above
The pullback of the map along the inclusion
Todd I’ll get back to writing more of what I had planned soon. I haven’t had a chance to digest what you’re writing yet, but I prefer to proceed without having to choose basepoints. I’d like to get you and Urs to have a look though when I get back to this within a few days.
David: Of course - hence the theorem about functors from the fundamental groupoid and not the fundamental group. This is where the full tangent groupoid comes in: it is the pullback
or equivalently the slice for an internal groupoid (internal in , but extensions to other categories work too). The tangent groupoid at a point is just the subgroupoid of this gotten by pulling back along the inclusion . I hadn’t thought about applying this construction to my personal universal covering space recipe, so maybe we need to take the discrete topology on . That’s what your pullback square above seems to indicate. Urs’ and my paper [arXiv:0708.1741] has stuff on tangent groupoids for anyone who interested in pitching in.
Last revised on July 17, 2017 at 22:06:13. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.