Homotopy Bott-Taubes integrals and the Taylor tower for spaces of knots and links

Robin Koytcheff

Published 2011-02-11, updated 2015-06-02Version 3

This work continues the study of a homotopy-theoretic construction of the author inspired by the Bott-Taubes integrals. Bott and Taubes constructed knot invariants by integrating differential forms along the fiber of a bundle over the space of knots. Their techniques were later used by Cattaneo et al. to construct real "Vassiliev-type" cohomology classes in spaces of knots in higher-dimensional Euclidean space. By doing this integration via a Pontrjagin-Thom construction, we constructed cohomology classes in the knot space with arbitrary coefficients. We later showed that a refinement of this construction recovers the Milnor triple linking number for string links. We conjecture that we can produce all Vassiliev-type classes in this manner. Here we extend our homotopy-theoretic constructions to the stages of the Taylor tower for the knot space, which arises from the Goodwillie-Weiss embedding calculus. We use the model of "punctured knots and links" for the Taylor tower.