We provide a simple condition on rational cohomology for the total space of a pullback fibration over a connected sum to have the rational homotopy type of a connected sum after looping. This takes inspiration from a recent work of Jeffrey and Selick, in which they study pullback fibrations of this type but under stronger hypotheses compared to our result.

Let $G$ be a finite group with cyclic Sylow $p$-subgroups, and let $k$ be a field of characteristic $p$. Then $H^{*}(BG;k)$ and $H_*(\Omega BG{{}^{{}^{\wedge }}_p};k)$ are $A_\infty$ algebras whose structure we determine up to quasi-isomorphism.

We introduce a notion of Koszul A∞-algebra that generalizes Priddy's notion of a Koszul algebra and we use it to construct small A∞-algebra models for Hochschild cochains. As an application, this yields new techniques for computing free loop space homology algebras of manifolds that are either formal or coformal (over a field or over the integers). We illustrate these techniques in two examples.

Felix and Murillo introduced the group $\mathrm{Aut}_\varOmega(X)$ of self-maps $f$ of $X$, which satisfy $\sOm f=1_{\varOmega X}$, and proved that the group is nilpotent with the order of nilpotency bounded by the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category of $X$. In this paper we construct a spectral sequence converging to the group $\mathrm{Aut}_\varOmega(X)$ and derive several interesting consequences.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 55P42