Embedding calculus and Vassiliev spectral sequence

Abstract

Vassiliev spectral sequence and Sinha spectral sequence are both related to cohomology of the space of long knots $\mathbb{R}\to \mathbb{R}^3$. Although they have different origins, the Vassiliev $E_1$-page and the Sinha $E_2$-page are isomorphic (up to a degree shift). In this paper, we prove that they have isomorphic $E_\infty$-pages if the coefficient ring is a field. Together with degeneracy of the Sinha sequence, this implies that the Vassiliev sequence degenerates at $E_1$-page over $\mathbb{Q}$ including the non-diagonal part. Our result also implies that for any coefficient field, the space of finite type $n$ knot invariants is isomorphic to the space of weight systems of weight $\leq n$ if and only if the parts of the Sinha sequence of bidegree $(-i,i)$ degenerate at $E_2$ for $i\leq 2n$. For the construction of the isomorphism, we use a variant of Thom space model which was introduced in the author's previous paper and captures embedding calculus of the knot space in terms of fat diagonals. As a byproduct of the construction, we give a partial computation on differentials of unstable versions of the Vassiliev sequence which converge to finite dimensional approximations of the knot space.