Boardman--Vogt tensor products of absolutely free operads

Abstract

We establish a combinatorial model for the Boardman--Vogt tensor product of several absolutely free operads, that is free symmetric operads that are also free as $\mathbb{S}$-modules. Our results imply that such a tensor product is always a free $\mathbb{S}$-module, in contrast with the results of Kock and Bremner--Madariaga on hidden commutativity for the Boardman--Vogt tensor square of the operad of non-unital associative algebras.