Related papers: Tautological classes and smooth bundles over BSU(2…
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…
We study manifolds arising as spaces of sections of complex manifolds fibering over the projective line with normal bundle of each section isomorphic to several copies of O(k). Such manifolds provide a natural setting for certain integrable…
We use gauge theoretic and algebraic methods to examine sufficient conditions for smooth points on the moduli space of flat connections on a compact manifold and on the character variety of a finitely generated and presented group. We give…
Given any topological group $G$, the topological classification of principal $G$-bundles over a finite CW-complex $X$ is long-known to be given by the set of free homotopy classes of maps from $X$ to the corresponding classifying space…
A review of the characterization of principal bundles, through the different properties of the action of a group and its related canonical and translation maps, is presented. The work is divided in three stages: a topological group acting…
Let $C_2$ denote the cyclic group of order 2. We compute the $RO(C_2)$-graded cohomology of all $C_2$-surfaces with constant integral coefficients. We show when the action is nonfree, the answer depends only on the genus, the orientability…
A product of a K3 surface $S$ and a flat 3-dimensional torus $T^3$ is a manifold with holonomy $SU(2)$. Since $SU(2)$ is a subgroup of $G_2$, $S\times T^3$ carries a torsion-free $G_2$-structure. We assume that $S$ admits an action of…
We prove several basic ring-theoretic results about tautological rings of manifolds W, that is, the rings of generalised Miller--Morita--Mumford classes for fibre bundles with fibre W. Firstly we provide conditions on the rational…
Our aim is to determine the tautological algebra generated by the cohomology classes of the Brill-Noether loci in the rational cohomology of the moduli stack $\mathcal{U}_C(n,d)$ of semistable bundles of rank $n$ and degree $d$. We show…
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…
Let $M_g$ be the moduli space of smooth genus $g$ curves. We define a notion of Chow groups of $M_g$ with coefficients in a representation of $Sp(2g)$, and we define a subgroup of tautological classes in these Chow groups with twisted…
Stiefel-Whitney classes are invariants of the tangent bundle of a smooth manifold, represented as cohomology classes of the base manifold. These classes are essential in obstruction theory, embedding problems, and cobordism theory. In this…
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…
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…
A gauge group is the topological group of automorphisms of a principal bundle. We compute the integral cohomology ring of the classifying spaces of gauge groups of principal U(n)-bundles over the 2-sphere by generalizing the operation for…
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…
We show that every effective smooth action of a Lie group G on a manifold M is a diffeomorphism from G onto its image in Diff(M), where the image is equipped with the subset diffeology of the functional diffeology.
We study tautological rings for high dimensional manifolds, that is, for each smooth manifold $M$ the ring $R^*(M)$ of those of characteristic classes of smooth fibre bundles with fibre $M$ which is generated by generalised…
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 the gauge theory approach to the geometric Langlands program, ramification can be described in terms of ``surface operators,'' which are supported on two-dimensional surfaces somewhat as Wilson or 't Hooft operators are supported on…