On Spineless Cacti, Deligne's Conjecture and Connes--Kreimer's Hopf Algebra

Using a cell model for the little discs operad in terms of spineless cacti we give a minimal common topological operadic formalism for three a priori disparate algebraic structures: (1) a solution to Deligne's conjecture on the Hochschild complex, (2) the Hopf algebra of Connes and Kreimer, and (3) the string topology of Chas and Sullivan.