Surgery on manifold operads

Abstract

We study cobordisms of a class of topological operads called ``manifold operads''. These operads are generalizations of the Fulton-MacPherson operad: an operad built from configurations of points in Euclidean space. Cobordism of manifold operads, along with the associated theory of surgery, depends crucially on delicate combinatorial results for trees associated to operadic bimodules. As an application of surgery, we produce infinitely many manifold operads which are left or right ``bimodule cobordant'' to, but not homotopy equivalent to the Fulton-MacPherson operad.