Related papers: Exotic smooth structures on topological fibre bund…

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 attempts to investigate the space of various characteristic classes for smooth manifold bundles with local system on the total space inducing a finite holonomy covering. These classes are known as twisted higher torsion classes.…

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 present a pair of smooth fiber bundles over the circle with a common $4$-dimensional fiber with the following properties: (1) their total spaces are diffeomorphic to each other; (2) they are isomorphic to each other as topological fiber…

Using the work of Dwyer, Weiss, and Williams we associate an invariant to any topologically trivial family of smooth h-cobordisms. This invariant is called the smooth structure class, and is closely related to the higher Franz--Reidemeister…

Kontsevich's characteristic classes are invariants of framed smooth fiber bundles with homology sphere fibers. It was shown by Watanabe that they can be used to distinguish smooth $S^4$-bundles that are all trivial as topological fiber…

We compare the higher analytic torsion of Bismut and Lott of a fibre bundle p: M -> B equipped with a flat vector bundle F -> M and a fibre-wise Morse function h on M with a higher torsion T that is constructed in terms of a families…

Using the higher analytic torsion form of Bismut and Lott we construct a characteristic class for smooth sphere bundles. We calculate this class in the case where the sphere bundle comes from a complex vector bundle. Related to these…

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,…

We generalise the Kreck-Stolz invariants s_2 and s_3 by defining a new invariant, the t-invariant, for quaternionic line bundles E over closed spin-manifolds M of dimension 4k-1 with H^3(M; \Q) = 0 such that c_2(E)\in H^4(M) is torsion. The…

M. Kontsevich constructed universal characteristic classes of smooth bundles with fiber a framed odd-dimensional integral homology sphere. In dimension 3, they are known to give a universal finite type invariants of homology 3-spheres.…

Given a unipotent bundle of smooth manifolds we construct its secondary transfer map and show that this map determines the higher smooth torsion of the bundle. This approach to higher torsion provides a new perspective on some of its…

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…

By explicitly comparing constructions, we prove that the higher torsion invariants of smooth bundles defined by Igusa and Klein via Morse theory agree with the higher torsion invariants defined by Badzioch, Dorabiala, Dwyer, Weiss, and…

Let p: M -> B be a family of compact manifolds equipped with a unitarily flat vector bundle F -> M. We generalize Igusa's higher Franz-Reidemeister torsion \tau(M/B;F) to the case that the fibre-wise cohomology H^*(M/B;F) -> B carries a…

Given a closed simply connected manifold $M$ of dimension $2n\ge6$, we compare the ring of characteristic classes of smooth oriented bundles with fibre $M$ to the analogous ring resulting from replacing $M$ by the connected sum…

We give a construction of a torsion invariant of bundles of smooth manifolds which is based on the work of Dwyer, Weiss and Williams on smooth structures on fibrations.

In this work, we study topological properties of surface bundles, with an emphasis on surface bundles with a spin structure. We develop a criterion to decide whether a given manifold bundle has a spin structure and specialize it to surface…

A topological invariant of a polynomial map $p:X\to B$ from a complex surface containing a curve $C\subset X$ to a one-dimensional base is given by a rational second homology class in the compactification of the moduli space of genus $g$…

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…