Sergei A. Merkulov

We study actions of the Grothendieck-Teichm\"uller group GRT on Poisson cohomologies of Poisson manifolds.

We review several well-known operads of compactified configuration spaces and construct several new such operads, C, in the category of smooth manifolds with corners whose complexes of fundamental chains give us (i) the 2-coloured operad of A-infinity algebras and their homotopy morphisms, (ii) the 2-coloured operad of L-infinity algebras and their homotopy morphisms, and (iii) the 4-coloured operad of open-closed homotopy algebras and their homotopy morphisms. Two gadgets - a (coloured) operad of Feynman graphs and a de Rham field theory on C - are introduced and used to construct quantized representations of the (fundamental) chain operad of C which are given by Feynman type sums over graphs and depend on choices of propagators.

Using a new compactification of the (braid) configuration space of n points in the upper half plane we construct a family of exotic Lie-infinity automorphisms of the Schouten algebra of polyvector fields on an affine space depending on a Kontsevich type propagator.

These are expanded notes of author's talk at the ECM 2008 attempting to give an elementary introduction into the main ideas of the theory of wheeled props for beginners, and also a survey of its most recent major applications (ranging from algebra and geometry to deformation theory and Batalin-Vilkovisky quantization) which might be of interest to experts.

Using technique of wheeled props we establish a correspondence between the homotopy theory of unimodular Lie 1-bialgebras and the famous Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism. Solutions of the so called quantum master equation satisfying certain boundary conditions are proven to be in 1-1 correspondence with representations of a wheeled dg prop which, on the one hand, is isomorphic to the cobar construction of the prop of unimodular Lie 1-bialgebras and, on the other hand, is quasi-isomorphic to the dg wheeled prop of unimodular Poisson structures. These results allow us to apply properadic methods for computing formulae for a homotopy transfer of a unimodular Lie 1-bialgebra structure on an arbitrary complex to the associated quantum master function on its cohomology. It is proven that in the category of quantum BV manifolds associated with the homotopy theory of unimodular Lie 1-bialgebras quasi-isomorphisms are equivalence relations. It is shown that Losev-Mnev's BF theory for unimodular Lie algebras can be naturally extended to the case of unimodular Lie 1-bialgebras (and, eventually, to the case of unimodular Poisson structures). Using a finite-dimensional version of the Batalin-Vilkovisky quantization formalism it is rigorously proven that the Feynman integrals computing the effective action of this new BF theory describe precisely homotopy transfer formulae obtained within the wheeled properadic approach to the quantum master equation. Quantum corrections (which are present in our BF model to all orders of the Planck constant) correspond precisely to what are often called "higher Massey products" in the homological algebra.