Fundamental groups of topological stacks with the slice property

Abstract

The main result of the paper is a formula for the fundamental group of the coarse moduli space of a topological stack. As an application, we find simple general formulas for the fundamental group of the coarse quotient of a group action on a topological space in terms of the fixed point data. The formulas seem, surprisingly, to be new. In particular, we recover, and vastly generalize, results of Armstrong, Bass, Higgins, Rhodes.