Stable Pontryagin-Thom construction for proper maps II

TL;DR

This paper extends a Pontryagin-Thom type construction to proper maps with a focus on cobordism classes of submanifolds and their relation to homotopy classes of proper maps, including non-compact cases.

Contribution

It generalizes the stable Pontryagin-Thom construction to include cobordisms of non-compact manifolds and maps into spaces determined by vector bundles.

Findings

Established a bijection between cobordism classes of submanifolds and homotopy classes of proper maps.

Extended the construction to non-compact manifolds with a new cobordism relation.

Connected cobordism theory with homotopy theory for a broader class of maps.

Abstract

In arXiv:1905.07734 we presented a construction that is an analogue of Pontryagin's for proper maps in stable dimensions. This gives a bijection between the cobordism set of framed embedded compact submanifolds in $W\times\mathbb{R}^n$ for a given manifold $W$ and a large enough number $n$, and the homotopy classes of proper maps from $W\times\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}^{k+n}$. In the present paper we generalise this result in a similar way as Thom's construction generalises Pontryagin's. In other words, we present a bijection between the cobordism set of submanifolds embedded in $W\times\mathbb{R}^n$ with normal bundles induced from a given bundle $\xi\oplus\varepsilon^n$, and the homotopy classes of proper maps from $W\times\mathbb{R}^n$ to a space $U(\xi\oplus\varepsilon^n)$ that depends on the given bundle. An important difference between Thom's construction and ours is that we also consider cobordisms of non-compact manifolds after indroducing a suitable notion of cobordism relation for these.