Related papers: Cech cocycles for differential characteristic clas…
We formulate differential cohomology and Chern-Weil theory -- the theory of connections on fiber bundles and of gauge fields -- abstractly in the context of a certain class of higher toposes that we call "cohesive". Cocycles in this…
We introduce a notion of secondary characteristic classes of Lie algebra extensions. As a spin-off of our construction we obtain a new proof of Lecomte's generalization of the Chern-Weil homomorphism.
Chern-Weil and Chern-Simons theory extend to certain infinite-rank bundles that appear in mathematical physics. We discuss what is known of the invariant theory of the corresponding infinite-dimensional Lie groups. We use these techniques…
We give a definition of differentiable cohomology of a Lie group G (possibly infinite-dimensional) with coefficients in any abelian Lie group. This differentiable cohomology maps both to the cohomology of the group made discrete and to Lie…
Using the concept of a cohesive module defined by Block, we use the theory of superconnections in the sense of Quillen to construct natural superconnections on Hermitian cohesive modules. By the Chern-Weil construction, we obtain…
For a local Lie group M we define odd order cohomology classes. The first class is an obstruction to globalizability of the local Lie group. The third class coincides with Godbillon-Vey class in a particular case. These classes are…
There are characteristic classes that are the obstructions to the vanishing of the differentials in the Lyndon-Hochischild-Serre spectral sequence of an extension of an integral lattice L by a group G. These characteristic classes exist in…
We introduce a cohomology, called extendable cohomology, for abstract complex singular varieties based on suitable differential forms. Beside a study of the general properties of such a cohomology, we show that, given a complex vector…
In this paper we extend the Chern-Weil-Lecomte characteristic map to the setting of $L_{\infty}$-algebras. In this general framework, characteristic classes of $L_{\infty}$-algebra extensions are defined by means of the Chern-Weil-Lecomte…
A theory of characteristic classes of vector bundles and smooth manifolds plays an important role in the theory of smooth manifolds. An investigation of reasonable notions of characteristic classes of singular spaces started since a…
We discuss secondary (and higher) characteristic classes for algebraic vector bundles with trivial top Chern class. We show that if X is a smooth affine scheme of dimension d over a field k of finite 2-cohomological dimension (with char(k)…
The Chern-Dold character of a cohomology theory E is a canonical transformation $E\rightarrow HV$ to ordinary cohomology. A spectrum representing E gives homotopy theoretic cocycles for E, while HV can be represented by singular cocycles.…
We show that every bad orbifold vector bundle can be realized as the restriction of a good orbifold vector bundle to a suborbifold of the base space. We give an explicit construction of this result in which the Chen-Ruan orbifold cohomology…
We describe the second integral cohomology group of a surface bundle as the group of Chern classes of fiberwise holomorphic complex line bundles and use this to obtain information on this group.
Based on a pair of cohomology operations on so called $\delta-2$-formal spaces, we construct the integral cohomology rings of the classifying spaces of the Lie groups $Spin(n)$ and $Spin^{c}(n)$. As applications, we introduce characteristic…
In this paper we study the variability and rigidity of secondary characteristic classes which arise from flat connections on a manifold. Considering the connection as a Lie-algebra valued one-form, we study the characteristic map from Lie…
We construct Chern-Weil classes on infinite dimensional vector bundles with structure group contained in the algebra $\cl[\leq 0](M, E)$ of non-positive order classical pseudo-differential operators acting on a finite rank vector bundle $E$…
We study the existence of $S^1$-equivariant characteristic classes on certain natural infinite rank bundles over the loop space $LM$ of a manifold $M$. We discuss the different $S^1$-equivariant cohomology theories in the literature and…
Let $\pi\colon P\to M$ be a principal bundle and $p$ an invariant polynomial of degree r on the Lie algebra of the structure group. The theory of Chern-Simons differential characters is exploited to define an homology map $\chi^{k} :…
We study a Hopf algebroid, $\calh$, naturally associated to the groupoid $U_n^\delta\ltimes U_n$. We show that classes in the Hopf cyclic cohomology of $\calh$ can be used to define secondary characteristic classes of trivialized flat…