Long Box Bracket Operations in Homotopy Theory

Secondary homotopy operations called box bracket operations were defined in the homotopy theory of an arbitrary 2-category with zeros by Hardie, Marcum and Oda (Rend Ist Mat Univ Trieste, 33:19–70 2001). For the topological 2-category of based spaces, based maps and based track classes of based homotopies, the classical Toda bracket is a particular example of a box bracket operation and subsequent development of the theory has refined, clarified and placed in this more general context many of the properties of classical Toda brackets. In this paper, and for the topological case only, we use an inductive definition to extend the theory to long box brackets. As is well-known, the necessity to manage higher homotopy coherence is a complicating factor in the consideration of such higher order operations. The key to our construction is the definition of an appropriate triple box bracket operation and consequently we focus primarily on the properties of the triple box bracket. We exhibit and exploit the relationship of the classical quaternary Toda bracket to the triple box bracket. As our main results we establish some computational techniques for triple box brackets that are based on composition methods. Some specific computations from the homotopy groups of spheres are included.