Bott-Chern and Aeppli homotopy

Abstract

This paper introduces Bott-Chern and Aeppli homotopy sets for a fibrant class of bisimplicial sets and establishes their basic properties. In positive bidegrees, Bott-Chern homotopy sets carry natural monoid structures, while Aeppli homotopy sets carry natural group structures. They are related by a loop-space comparison: after a bidegree shift, the Aeppli homotopy groups of X are naturally identified with the Bott-Chern homotopy monoids of the loop space of X. In particular, the Bott-Chern homotopy monoids of loop spaces are groups. To justify our definitions, we show that the Bott-Chern homotopy monoids of a bisimplicial abelian group are naturally isomorphic to the Bott-Chern homology groups of its associated normalized Moore bicomplex. An analogous statement holds for Aeppli homotopy.