Szczarba's twisting cochain is comultiplicative

Abstract

We prove that Szczarba's twisting cochain is comultiplicative. In particular, the induced map from the cobar construction of the chains on a 1-reduced simplicial set X to the chains on the Kan loop group of X is a quasi-isomorphism of dg bialgebras. We also show that Szczarba's twisted shuffle map is a dgc map connecting a twisted Cartesian product with the associated twisted tensor product. This gives a natural dgc model for fibre bundles. We apply our results to finite covering spaces and to the Serre spectral sequence.