The diagonal of a multicosimplicial object

Abstract

We show that the functor that takes a multicosimplicial object in a model category to its diagonal cosimplicial object is a right Quillen functor. This implies that the diagonal of a Reedy fibrant multicosimplicial object is a Reedy fibrant cosimplicial object, which has applications to the calculus of functors. We also show that, although the diagonal functor is a Quillen functor, it is not a Quillen equivalence for multicosimplicial spaces. We also discuss total objects and homotopy limits of multicosimplicial objects. We show that the total object of a multicosimplicial object is isomorphic to the total object of the diagonal, and that the diagonal embedding of the cosimplicial indexing category into the multicosimplicial indexing category is homotopy left cofinal, which implies that the homotopy limits are weakly equivalent if the multicosimplicial object is at least objectwise fibrant.