Related papers: Algebraic independence of generalized Morita-Mille…

The most basic characteristic classes of smooth fibre bundles are the generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford classes, obtained by fibre integrating characteristic classes of the vertical tangent bundle. In this note we show that they may be…

We prove vanishing results for the generalized Miller-Morita-Mumford classes of some smooth bundles whose fiber is a closed manifold that supports a nonpositively curved Riemannian metric. We also find, under some extra conditions, that the…

Characteristic classes of fibre bundles $E^{d+n}\to B^n$ in the category of closed oriented manifolds give rise to characteristic numbers by integrating the classes over the base. Church, Farb and Thibault [CFT] raised the question of which…

Tautological classes, or generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford classes, are basic characteristic classes of smooth fibre bundles, and have recently been used to describe the rational cohomology of classifying spaces of diffeomorphism groups for…

The generalized Miller-Morita-Mumford classes of a manifold bundle with fiber $M$ depend only on the underlying $\tau_M$-fibration, meaning the family of vector bundles formed by the tangent bundles of the fibers. This motivates a closer…

We study relations among characteristic classes of smooth manifold bundles with highly-connected fibers. For bundles with fiber the connected sum of $g$ copies of a product of spheres $S^d \times S^d$ and an odd $d$, we find numerous…

Let $K$ be the K3 manifold. In this note, we discuss two methods to prove that certain generalized Miller--Morita--Mumford classes for smooth bundles with fiber $K$ are non-zero. As a consequence, we fill a gap in a paper of the first…

In this paper, we construct new characteristic classes of fiber bundles via flat connections with values in infinite-dimensional Lie algberas of derivations. In fact, choosing a fiberwise metric, we construct a chain map to the de Rham…

A Q-manifold is a graded manifold endowed with a vector field of degree one squaring to zero. We consider the notion of a Q-bundle, that is, a fiber bundle in the category of Q-manifolds. To each homotopy class of ``gauge fields'' (sections…

Each Morita--Mumford--Miller (MMM) class e_n assigns to each genus g >= 2 surface bundle S_g -> E^{2n+2} -> M^{2n} an integer e_n^#(E -> M) := <e_n,[M]> in Z. We prove that when n is odd the number e_n^#(E -> M) depends only on the…

We produce new cohomology for non-uniform arithmetic lattices $\Gamma<SO(p,q)$ using a technique of Millson--Raghunathan. From this, we obtain new characteristic classes of manifold bundles with fiber a closed $4k$-dimensional manifold $M$…

We study smooth bundles over surfaces with highly connected almost parallelizable fiber $M$ of even dimension, providing necessary conditions for a manifold to be bordant to the total space of such a bundle and showing that, in most cases,…

Characteristic classes of oriented vector bundles can be identified with cohomology classes of the disjoint union of classifying spaces BSO_n of special orthogonal groups SO_n with n=0,1,... A characteristic class is stable if it extends to…

We study geometric properties of characteristic classes of surfaces bundles. In particular, we show that oriented surface bundles over bases with amenable fundamental groups and dimension at least 2 have trivial simplicial volume. We show…

We prove that group homology of the diffeomorphism group of $\#^g S^n \times S^n$ as a discrete group is independent of $g$ in a range, provided that $n>2$. This answers the high dimensional version of a question posed by Morita about…

Given a simply connected manifold $M$, we completely determine which rational monomial Pontryagin numbers are attained by fiber homotopy trivial $M$-bundles over the $k$-sphere, provided that $k$ is small compared to the dimension of $M$.…

We consider a closed odd-dimensional oriented manifold $M$ together with an acyclic flat hermitean vector bundle $\cF$. We form the trivial fibre bundle with fibre $M$ over the manifold of all Riemannian metrics on $M$. It has a natural…

We explain the relationship between various characteristic classes for smooth manifold bundles known as ``higher torsion'' classes. We isolate two fundamental properties that these cohomology classes may or may not have: additivity and…

We formalize the ``metric bundle'' viewpoint by defining, for any smooth $n$--manifold $M$, the open fiberwise cones $\mathcal{G}^{p,q}\subset S^2\Tstar M$ of nondegenerate symmetric bilinear forms with fixed signature $(p,q)$, and we…

When two smooth manifold bundles over the same base are fiberwise tangentially homeomorphic, the difference is measured by a homology class in the total space of the bundle. We call this the relative smooth structure class. Rationally and…