The rational homotopy type of a blow-up in the stable case

Pascal Lambrechts, Don Stanley

Published 2007-06-10Version 1

Suppose that f:V->W is an embedding of closed oriented manifolds whose normal bundle has the structure of a complex vector bundle. It is well known in both complex and symplectic geometry that one can then construct a manifold W' which is the blow-up of W along V. Assume that dim(W)>2.dim(V)+2 and that H^1(f) is injective. We construct an algebraic model of the rational homotopy type of the blow-up W' from an algebraic model of the embedding and the Chern classes of the normal bundle. This implies that if the space W is simply connected then the rational homotopy type of W' depends only on the rational homotopy class of f and on the Chern classes of the normal bundle.