The Goldman–Turaev Lie bialgebra in genus zero and the Kashiwara–Vergne problem.

In this paper, we describe a surprising link between the theory of the Goldman–Turaev Lie bialgebra on surfaces of genus zero and the Kashiwara–Vergne (KV) problem in Lie theory. Let Σ be an oriented 2-dimensional manifold with non-empty boundary and K a field of characteristic zero. The Goldman–Turaev Lie bialgebra is defined by the Goldman bracket { − , − } and Turaev cobracket δ on the K -span of homotopy classes of free loops on Σ. Applying an expansion θ : K π → K 〈 x 1 , … , x n 〉 yields an algebraic description of the operations { − , − } and δ in terms of non-commutative variables x 1 , … , x n . If Σ is a surface of genus g = 0 the lowest degree parts { − , − } − 1 and δ − 1 are canonically defined (and independent of θ ). They define a Lie bialgebra structure on the space of cyclic words which was introduced and studied by Schedler [31] . It was conjectured by the second and the third authors that one can define an expansion θ such that { − , − } = { − , − } − 1 and δ = δ − 1 . The main result of this paper states that for surfaces of genus zero constructing such an expansion is essentially equivalent to the KV problem. In [24] , Massuyeau constructed such expansions using the Kontsevich integral. In order to prove this result, we show that the Turaev cobracket δ can be constructed in terms of the double bracket (upgrading the Goldman bracket) and the non-commutative divergence cocycle which plays the central role in the KV theory. Among other things, this observation gives a new topological interpretation of the KV problem and allows to extend it to surfaces with arbitrary number of boundary components (and of arbitrary genus, see [2] ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]