Bredon homological stability for configuration spaces of $G$-manifolds

Abstract

McDuff and Segal proved that unordered configuration spaces of open manifolds satisfy homological stability: there is a stabilization map $σ: C_n(M)\to C_{n+1}(M)$ which is an isomorphism on $H_d(-;\mathbb{Z})$ for $n\gg d$. For a finite group $G$ and an open $G$-manifold $M$, under some hypotheses we define a family of equivariant stabilization maps $σ_{G/H}:C_n(M)\to C_{n+|G/H|}(M)$ for $H\leq G$. In general, these do not induce stability for Bredon homology, the equivariant analogue of singular homology. Instead, we show that each $σ_{G/H}$ induces isomorphisms on the ordinary homology of the fixed points of $C_n(M)$, and if the group is Dedekind (e.g. abelian), we obtain the following Bredon homological stability statement: $H^G_d(\bigsqcup_{n\geq 0}C_n(M))$ is finitely generated over $\mathbb{Z}[σ_{G/H} : H\leq G]$. This reduces to the classical statement when $G=e$.