String topology coproduct and Turaev cobracket on surfaces

Abstract

The string topology coproduct on the homology of the free loop space of a closed manifold induces a string cobracket on $S^1$-equivariant homology. We give a complete computation of the string topology coproduct for surfaces of higher genus by describing an algorithm which computes the coproduct of a cyclic word in terms of generators of the fundamental group of the surface. We further show that the string cobracket is the negative of the Turaev cobracket.

19 pages, 5 figures