Goodwillie’s cosimplicial model for the space of long knots and its applications

Abstract

We work out the details of a correspondence observed by Goodwillie between cosimplicial spaces and good functors from a category of open subsets of the interval to the category of compactly generated weak Hausdorff spaces. Using this, we compute the first page of the integral Bousfield–Kan homotopy spectral sequence of the tower of fibrations, given by the Taylor tower of the embedding functor associated to the space of long knots. Based on the methods in Conant (Am J Math 130(2):341–357. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajm.2008.0020, 2008), we give a combinatorial interpretation of the differentials d^1 mapping into the diagonal terms, by introducing the notion of (i, n)-marked unitrivalent graphs.