The topological chiral homology of the spherical category

TL;DR

This paper computes the topological chiral homology of spherical DG categories associated with algebraic groups, revealing a deep connection between topological quantum field theories and stacks of local systems.

Contribution

It introduces a general framework for computing topological chiral homology of spherical categories, extending to higher dimensions and relating to the cobordism hypothesis.

Findings

Provides a Stokes-style formula for topological chiral homology.

Establishes a monoidal equivalence for the case of Riemann surfaces and spherical categories.

Connects topological chiral homology with stacks of local systems and sheaf theory.

Abstract

We consider the spherical DG category $Sph_G$ attached to an affine algebraic group $G$. By definition, $Sph_G := IndCoh(LS_G(S^2))$ consists of ind-coherent sheaves of the stack of $G$-local systems on the $2$-sphere $S^2$. The $3$-dimensional version of the pair of pants endows $Sph_G$ with an $E_3$-monoidal structure. More generally, for an algebraic stack $Y$ (satisfying some mild conditions) and $n \geq -1$, we can look at the $E_{n+1}$-monoidal DG category $Sph(Y,n) := IndCoh_0((Y^{S^n})^\wedge_Y)$, where $IndCoh_0$ is the sheaf theory introduced in [AG2] and [centerH]. % The case of $Sph_G$ is recovered by setting $Y =BG$ and $n=2$. The cobordism hypothesis associates to $Sph(Y,n)$ an $(n+1)$-dimensional TQFT, whose value of a manifold $M^d$ of dimension $d \leq n+1$ (possibly with boundary) is given by the {topological chiral homology} $\int_{M^d} Sph(Y,n)$. % In this paper, we compute such homology (in virtually all cases): we have the Stokes style formula $$ \int_{M^d} Sph(Y,n) \simeq IndCoh_0 ( (Y^{\partial(M^d \times D^{n+1-d})})^\wedge_{Y^M} ) , $$ where the formal completion is constructed using the obvious projection $\partial(M^d \times D^{n+1-d}) \to M^d$. The most interesting instance of this formula is for $Sph_G \simeq Sph(BG,2)$, the original spherical category, and $X$ a Riemann surface. In this case, we obtain a monoidal equivalence $\int_X Sph_G \simeq H(LS_G^{Betti}(X))$, where $LS_G^{Betti}(X)$ is the stack of $G$-local systems on the topological space underlying $X$ and $H$ is the sheaf theory introduced in [centerH].