String topology for stacks

We establish the general machinery of string topology for differentiable stacks. This machinery allows us to treat on an equal footing free loops in stacks and hidden loops. In particular, we give a good notion of a free loop stack, and of a mapping stack Map(Y,X), where Y is a compact space and X a topological stack, which is functorial both in X and Y and behaves well enough with respect to pushouts. We also construct a bivariant (in the sense of Fulton and MacPherson) theory for topological stacks: it gives us a flexible theory of Gysin maps which are automatically compatible with pullback, pushforward and products. We introduce oriented stacks, generalizing oriented manifolds, which are stacks on which we can do string topology. We prove that the homology of the free loop stack of an oriented stack is a BV-algebra and a Frobenius algebra, and the homology of hidden loops is a Frobenius algebra. Using our general machinery, we construct an intersection pairing for (non necessarily compact) almost complex orbifolds which is in the same relation to the intersection pairing for manifolds as Chen-Ruan orbifold cup-product is to ordinary cup-product of manifolds. We show that the string product of almost complex is isomorphic to the orbifold intersection pairing twisted by a canonical class.