Bifiltrations and persistence paths for 2–Morse functions

This paper studies the homotopy-type of bi-filtrations of compact manifolds induced as the pre-image of filtrations of the plane for generic smooth functions f : M --> R^2. The primary goal of the paper is to allow for a simple description of the multi-graded persistent homology associated to such filtrations. The main result of the paper is a description of the evolution of the bi-filtration of f in terms of cellular attachments. An analogy of Morse-Conley equation and Morse inequalities along so called persistence paths are derived. A scheme for computing path-wise barcodes is proposed.