Floer homology of cotangent bundles and the loop product

Abstract

We prove that the pair-of-pants product on the Floer homology of the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold M corresponds to the Chas-Sullivan loop product on the singular homology of the loop space of M. We also prove related results concerning the Floer homological interpretation of the Pontrjagin product and of the Serre fibration. The techniques include a Fredholm theory for Cauchy-Riemann operators with jumping Lagrangian boundary conditions of conormal type, and a new cobordism argument replacing the standard gluing technique.