Speaker: Behrang Noohi
Title: String Topology for Stacks
Affiliation: Florida State University
Date: Friday, February 22, 2008
Place and Time: Room 101, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm
Refreshments: Room 204, Love Building, 3:00 pm

Abstract. String topology (Chas-Sullivan, Cohen, Jones,...) studies the homology of the loop space of a manifold by exploiting the so-called string operations. With the goal of producing an equivariant version of the theory, we formulate string topology for topological stacks and prove the existence of string operations under certain natural hypotheses. As a consequence, we obtain equivariant string topology for compact Lie group actions on manifolds. This is a joint work with K. Behrend, G. Ginot, and P. Xu.