Related papers: On the geometric nature of characteristic classes …

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…

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,…

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…

In this paper, we consider an obstruction-theoretical construction of characteristic classes of fiber bundles by simplicial method. We can get a certain obstruction class for a deformation of $C_\infty$-algebra models of fibers and a…

The generalized Morita-Miller-Mumford classes of a smooth oriented manifold bundle are defined as the image of the characteristic classes of the vertical tangent bundle under the Gysin homomorphism. We show that if the dimension of the…

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…

We prove the existence of many non-trivial characteristic classes of smooth oriented bundles with fibre a product $ S^{n}\times S^{n} $ of odd-dimensional spheres. We do so by proving injectivity of the map from the ring of rational…

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…

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…

We show that if M is a surface bundle over S^1 with fiber of genus 2, then for any integer n, M has a finite cover tilde(M) with b_1(tilde(M)) > n. A corollary is that M can be geometrized using only the `non-fiber' case of Thurston's…

Morita showed that for each power of the Euler class, there are examples of flat $\mathbb{S}^1$-bundles for which the power of the Euler class does not vanish. Haefliger asked if the same holds for flat odd-dimensional sphere bundles. In…

In this paper we give the first example of a surface bundle over a surface with at least three fiberings. In fact, for each $n \ge 3$ we construct $4$-manifolds $E$ admitting at least $n$ distinct fiberings $p_i: E \to \Sigma_{g_i}$ as a…

We study the Euler class of smooth orientable infinite-type surface bundles with a section. For many such surfaces, we show that this cohomology class is nontrivial, and that the behavior of its powers depends on the genus and the type of…

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…

We use a variation of a classical construction of A. Hatcher to construct virtually all stable exotic smooth structures on compact smooth manifold bundles whose fibers have sufficiently large odd dimension (at least twice the base dimension…

This paper is about cohomology of mapping class groups from the perspective of arithmetic groups. For a closed surface $S$ of genus $g$, the mapping class group $Mod(S)$ admits a well-known arithmetic quotient $Mod(S)\rightarrow Sp(2g, Z)$,…

We apply our earlier work on the higher-dimensional analogue of the Mumford conjecture to two questions. Inspired by work of Ebert we prove non-triviality of certain characteristic classes of bundles of smooth closed manifolds. Inspired by…

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 $M$…

Let W be the germ of a smooth complex surface around an exceptional curve and let E be a rank 2 vector bundle on W. We study the cohomological properties of a finite sequence $E_i, 1 \leq i \leq t$ of rank 2 vector bundles canonically…

The Miller-Morita-Mumford classes associate to an oriented surface bundle $E\to B$ a class $\kappa_i(E) \in H^{2i}(B;\Z)$. In this note we define for each prime $p$ and each integer $i\geq 1$ a secondary characteristic class $\lambda_i(E)…