Chern classes and unitary equivalence of normal matrices over topological spaces

This paper continues the authors' work on the question of unitary equivalence of matrices with entries in the complex-valued functions of a topological space (matrices over spaces). Specifically, we here consider the question of unitary equivalence for pairs of normal matrices over a space that share a common characteristic polynomial that can be globally factored into distinct linear factors. We show that such a matrix is diagonalizable if and only if the first Chern classes of its eigenbundles all vanish and derive as an application that all such matrices over $\mathbb{C}P^m$ are diagonalizable for $m > 1$. Next, given a CW complex $X$ and a polynomial $\mu$ in $C(X)[\lambda]$ that globally splits into distinct linear factors, we prove that the number of unitary equivalence classes of matrices with $\mu$ as a characteristic polynomial depends only on the space $X$ and the degree of $\mu$, and we give some estimates on how many unitary equivalence classes there can be. In the case that $X$ is a CW complex of dimension at most three, we demonstrate a bijection between the unitary equivalence classes of $n \times n$ normal matrices with characteristic polynomial $\mu$ and elements of the group $(H^2(X))^{n-1}$. Finally, when $X$ is a smooth manifold and we restrict to matrices with smooth entries, we construct a de Rham cohomology class whose nonvanishing is an obstruction to unitary equivalence.