The aim of this short survey is to give a quick introduction to the Salvetti complex as a tool for the study of the cohomology of Artin groups. In particular we show how a spectral sequence induced by a filtration on the complex provides a very natural and useful method to study recursively the cohomology of Artin groups, simplifying many computations. In the last section some examples of applications are presented.
We describe, for any compact connected Lie group G and any prime p, the monoid of self maps → which are rational equivalences. Here, denotes the p-adic completion of the classifying space of G. Among other things, we show that two such maps are homotopic if and only if they induce the same homomorphism in rational cohomology, if and only if their restrictions to the classifying space of the maximal torus of G are homotopic.
We show that for n ≥ 3 the symplectic group Sp(n) is as a 2-compact group determined up to isomorphism by the isomorphism type of its maximal torus normalizer. This allows us to determine the integral homotopy type of Sp(n) among connected finite loop spaces with maximal torus.