Notation: Let$M$ be a smooth, closed manifold, $S$ any submanifold of $M$, $Diff(M)$ the group of diffeomorphisms of $M$ and $Imb(S, M)$ the group of smooth imbeddings of $S$ into $M$.
A classical result of R. Palais from the 1960 paper Local triviality of the restriction map for embeddings says that the map $Diff(M)$ $\rightarrow$ $Imb(S, M)$ given by restriction is a fibration.
I feel like I've heard during numerous teas that there are various refinements and generalizations of this due to J. Cerf and (possibly) others.
(1) Can anyone summarize what else is known in this direction beyond the theorem of Palais?
(2) Is there a way to see Palais' result easily? [added: from the responses it sounds like the original paper is still a great way to see this result. But see the answers of Randal-Williams and Palais for an alternate route.]
Best Answer
It's not clear what you mean by "various refinements and generalizations". Cerf has a huge paper published by IHES "Topologie de certains espaces de plongements" which goes into many related details. In a way it's more of a ground-up collection of basic information on the topology of function spaces.
Regarding your 2nd question, if instead of demanding a fibre bundle you ask for a Serre fibration, the proof is relatively simple. It's just the isotopy extension theorem with parameters, and the proof is pretty much verbatim Hirsch's proof of isotopy extension in his "Differential Topology" text plus the observation that solutions depend smoothly on the initial conditions.
Regarding your 2nd question, yes of course. Palais's paper is quite nice. If you haven't had a look at it, you might as well try -- it's only 7 pages long. If you want to discover the proof on your own I'd start with the case $S$ a finite set. Then move up to $S$ a positive-dimensional submanifold. You'll want to be comfortable with things like the proof of the tubular neighbourhood theorem, the concept of injectivity radius, etc.