The cohomology ring of free loop spaces

Abstract

Let X be a simply connected space and k a commutative ring. Goodwillie, Burghelea and Fiedorowiscz proved that the Hochschild cohomology of the singular chains on the pointed loop space HH^{*}S_*(\Omega X) is isomorphic to the free loop space cohomology H^{*}(X^{S^{1}}). We proved that this isomorphism is compatible with both the cup product on HH^{*}S_*(\Omega X) and on H^{*}(X^{S^{1}}). In particular, we explicit the algebra H^{*}(X^{S^{1}}) when X is a suspended space, a complex projective space or a finite CW-complex of dimension p such that \frac {1}{(p-1)!}\in k.