Morse-Bott cohomology from homological perturbation

Abstract: In this talk, I will give a new construction of the Morse-Bott cochain complex, where the underlying vector space is generated by the cohomology of the critical manifolds. This new construction has two nice features: (1) It requires the minimum amount of transversality. (2) The choices made in the construction do not depend on the moduli spaces. I will explain its relation to three other constructions in literature, namely Austin-Braam's push-pull construction, Fukaya's push-pull construction and the cascades construction. I will then discuss the equivariant counterpart and the generalization in the polyfold theory.