Strongly homotopy Lie algebras

Abstract

The present paper can be thought of as a continuation of the paper "Introduction to sh Lie algebras for physicists" by T. Lada and J. Stasheff (International Journal of Theoretical Physics Vol. 32, No. 7 (1993), 1087--1103, appeared also as preprint hep-th/9209099) which provided an exposition of the basic ingredients of the theory of strongly homotopy Lie algebras sufficient for the underpinnings of the physically relevant examples. We demonstrate the `strong homotopy' analog of the usual relation between Lie and associative algebras and investigate the universal enveloping algebra functor emerging as the left adjoint of the symmetrization functor. We show that the category of homotopy associative algebras carries a natural monoidal structure such that the universal enveloping algebra is a unital coassociative cocommutative coalgebra with respect to this monoidal structure. The last section is concerned with the relation between homotopy modules and weak homotopy maps. The present paper is complementary to what currently exists in the literature, both physical and mathematical.