On several varieties of cacti and their relations

Motivated by string topology and the arc operad, we introduce the notion of quasi-operads and consider four (quasi)-operads which are different varieties of the operad of cacti. These are cacti without local zeros (or spines) and cacti proper as well as both varieties with fixed constant size one of the constituting loops. Using the recognition principle of Fiedorowicz, we prove that spineless cacti are equivalent as operads to the little discs operad. It turns out that in terms of spineless cacti Cohen's Gerstenhaber structure and Fiedorowicz' braided operad structure are given by the same explicit chains. We also prove that spineless cacti and cacti are homotopy equivalent to their normalized versions as quasi-operads by showing that both types of cacti are semi-direct products of the quasi-operad of their normalized versions with a re-scaling operad based on R>0. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of bi-crossed products of quasi-operads and show that the cacti proper are a bi-crossed product of the operad of cacti without spines and the operad based on the monoid given by the circle group S^1. We also prove that this particular bi-crossed operad product is homotopy equivalent to the semi-direct product of the spineless cacti with the group S^1. This implies that cacti are equivalent to the framed little discs operad. These results lead to new CW models for the little discs and the framed little discs operad.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol5/agt-5-13.abs.htm

Enumeration of m-ary cacti

The purpose of this paper is to enumerate various classes of cyclically colored m-gonal plane cacti, called m-ary cacti. This combinatorial problem is motivated by the topological classification of complex polynomials having at most m critical values, studied by Zvonkin and others. We obtain explicit formulae for both labelled and unlabelled m-ary cacti, according to i) the number of polygons, ii) the vertex-color distribution, iii) the vertex-degree distribution of each color. We also enumerate m-ary cacti according to the order of their automorphism group. Using a generalization of Otter's formula, we express the species of m-ary cacti in terms of rooted and of pointed cacti. A variant of the m-dimensional Lagrange inversion is then used to enumerate these structures. The method of Liskovets for the enumeration of unrooted planar maps can also be adapted to m-ary cacti.Comment: LaTeX2e, 28 pages, 9 figures (eps), 3 table

Groups, cacti and framed little discs

Let G be a topological group. Then the based loopspace of G is an algebra over the cacti operad, while the double loopspace of the classifying space of G is an algebra over the framed little discs operad. This paper shows that these two algebras are equivalent, in the sense that they are weakly equivalent E-algebras, where E is an operad weakly equivalent to both framed little discs and cacti. We recover the equivalence between cacti and framed little discs, and Menichi's isomorphism between the BV-algebras obtained by taking the homology of the loopspace of G and of the double loopspace of BG.Comment: 40 page

Cells and cacti

Let $(W,S)$ be a Coxeter system, let $\varphi$ be a weight function on $S$ and let ${\mathrm{Cact}}\_W$ denote the associated {\it cactus group}. Following an idea of I. Losev, we construct an action of ${\mathrm{Cact}}\_W \times {\mathrm{Cact}}\_W$ on $W$ which has nice properties with respect to the partition of $W$ into left, right or two-sided cells (under some hypothesis, which hold for instance if $\varphi$ is constant or if $W$ is finite of rank \textless{} 5). It must be noticed that the action depends heavily on $\varphi$.Comment: 23 pages. This new version extends the scope of validity of the main result by removing an hypothesis. For this purpose, we have slightly extended some results of arXiv:1502.0166

McClure-Smith cosimplicial machinery and the cacti operad

McClure and Smith constructed a functor that sends a topological multiplicative operad O to an E_2 algebra TotO. They define in fact an operad D_2 (acting on the totalization TotO) weakly equivalent to the little 2-disks operad. On the other hand, Salvatore showed that D_2 is isomorphic to the cacti operad MS, which has a nice geometric description. He also built a geometric action of MS on TotO. In this paper we detail the McClure-Smith action and the cacti action. Our main result says that they are compatible in the sense that some squares must commute.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure