# Interesting Esoterica

• Published in 1998
In the collections
We introduce a new operad, which we call the Swiss-cheese operad. It mixes naturally the little disks and the little intervals operads. The Swiss-cheese operad is related to the configuration spaces of points on the upper half-plane and points on the real line, considered by Kontsevich for the sake of deformation quantization. This relation is similar to the relation between the little disks operad and the configuration spaces of points on the plane. The Swiss-cheese operad may also be regarded as a finite-dimensional model of the moduli space of genus-zero Riemann surfaces appearing in the open-closed string theory studied recently by Zwiebach. We describe algebras over the homology of the Swiss-cheese operad.

### BibTeX entry

@article{TheSwissCheeseOperad,
abstract = {We introduce a new operad, which we call the Swiss-cheese operad. It mixes
naturally the little disks and the little intervals operads. The Swiss-cheese
operad is related to the configuration spaces of points on the upper half-plane
and points on the real line, considered by Kontsevich for the sake of
deformation quantization. This relation is similar to the relation between the
little disks operad and the configuration spaces of points on the plane. The
Swiss-cheese operad may also be regarded as a finite-dimensional model of the
moduli space of genus-zero Riemann surfaces appearing in the open-closed string
theory studied recently by Zwiebach. We describe algebras over the homology of
}