Umkehr Maps Patched via the Compactified Cleavage Operad

Abstract

Via a compactification of the cleavage operad, we describe two actions on the mapping spaces from spheres into compact, oriented manifolds. The map from the compactified version of the cleavage operad provides a version of intersection theory along the underlying base manifold lifted to the mapping space. The other action map only works for the uncompactified cleavage operad, and gives a homotopy theoretic version of higher dimensional string topology.