The Birman-Craggs-Johnson homomorphism and abelian cycles in the Torelli group
Abstract
In the 1970s, Birman-Craggs-Johnson used Rochlin's invariant for homology 3-spheres to construct a remarkable surjective homomorphism sigma:I_{g,1}->B_3, where I_{g,1} is the Torelli group and B_3 is a certain F_2-vector space of Boolean (square-free) polynomials. By pulling back cohomology classes and evaluating them on abelian cycles, we construct 16g^4 + O(g^3) dimensions worth of nontrivial elements of H^2(I_{g,1}, F_2) which cannot be detected rationally. These classes in fact restrict to nontrivial classes in the cohomology of the subgroup K_{g,1} < I_{g,1} generated by Dehn twists about separating curves. We also use the ``Casson-Morita algebra'' and Morita's integral lift of the Birman-Craggs-Johnson map restricted to K_{g,1} to give the same lower bound on H^2(K_{g,1},Z).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.math/0601163,
title = {The Birman-Craggs-Johnson homomorphism and abelian cycles in the Torelli group},
author = {Tara E. Brendle and Benson Farb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0601163},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
21 pages, 7 figures