Tate cohomology of circle actions as a Heisenberg group

Abstract

We study the Madsen-Tillman spectrum \CP^\infty_{-1} as a quotient of the Mahowald pro-object \CP^\infty_{-\infty}, which is closely related to the Tate cohomology of circle actions. That theory has an associated symplectic structure, whose symmetries define the Virasoro operations on the cohomology of moduli space constructed by Kontsevich and Witten.

This is a revision of an earlier posting, with the name changed slightly. The paper has been reorganized, and some howlers related to the Segal conjecture have been eliminated