Homotopy Inner Products for Cyclic Operads

Abstract

We introduce the notion of homotopy inner products for any cyclic quadratic Koszul operad $\mathcal O$, generalizing the construction already known for the associative operad. This is done by defining a colored operad $\widehat{\mathcal O}$, which describes modules over $\mathcal O$ with invariant inner products. We show that $\widehat{\mathcal O}$ satisfies Koszulness and identify algebras over a resolution of $\widehat{\mathcal O}$ in terms of derivations and module maps. As an application we construct a homotopy inner product over the commutative operad on the cochains of any Poincaré duality space.