Spaces of embeddings of compact polyhedra into 2-manifolds

Abstract

Let M be a PL 2-manifold and X be a compact subpolyhedron of M and let E(X, M) denote the space of embeddings of X into M with the compact-open topology. In this paper we study an extension property of embeddings of X into M and show that the restriction map from the homeomorphism group of M to E(X, M) is a principal bundle. As an application we show that if M is a Euclidean PL 2-manifold and dim X >= 1 then the triple (E(X,M), E^LIP(X,M), E^PL(X, M)) is an (s,Sigma,sigma)-manifold, where E_K^LIP(X,M) and E_K^PL(X, M) denote the subspaces of Lipschitz and PL embeddings.