Séminaire de Géométrie et Groupes de l'ENS




Sergei Merkulov
(Stockholm University)

Graph complexes and deformation quantization


The first instances of graph complexes have been introduced by Kontsevich as a way to expose highly non-trivial interrelations between certain infinite dimensional Lie algebras and topological objects, including moduli spaces of curves, invariants of odd dimensional manifolds, and the group of outer automorphisms of a free group.
We develop a new technique for computing cohomology of an important class of directed graph complexes with wheels in terms of other much simpler purely operadic graph complexes. We apply this technique to compute cohomology of several classical examples and, as an application, give a new proof of celebrated Kontsevich's theorem on existence of star products on formal germs of Poisson manifolds.



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