Functorial invariants of trees and their cones

Abstract: We study the category whose objects are trees (with or without roots) and whose morphisms are contractions. We show that the corresponding contravariant module categories are Noetherian, and we study two natural families of modules over these categories. The first takes a tree to a graded piece of the homology of its unordered configuration space, or to the homology of the unordered configuration space of its cone. The second takes a tree to a graded piece of the intersection homology of the reciprocal plane of its cone, which is a vector space whose dimension is given by a Kazhdan-Lusztig coefficient. We prove finite generation results for each of these modules, which allow us to obtain results about the growth of Betti numbers of configuration spaces and of Kazhdan-Lusztig coefficients of graphical matroids.