Related papers: Tautological characteristic classes II: the Witt c…
We discuss the formalism of tautological characteristic classes of flat bundles. Applied to $PSL(2,K)$ it yields the Witt class of Nekovar. Applied to $PGL_+(2n,K)$, the general linear groups with positive determinant over an arbitrary…
We explain the relation between the Witt class and the universal equicommutative class for PSL(2,K). We discuss an analogue of the Milnor-Wood inequality.
We prove homology stability for elementary and special linear groups over rings with many units improving known stability ranges. Our result implies stability for unstable Quillen K-groups and proves a conjecture of Bass. For commutative…
We develop further basic tools in the theory of continuous bounded cohomology of locally compact groups. We apply this tools to establish a Milnor-Wood type inequality in a very general context and to prove a global rigidity result which…
The Milnor-Wood inequality states that if a (topological) oriented circle bundle over an orientable surface of genus $g$ has a smooth transverse foliation, then the Euler class of the bundle satisfies $$|\mathcal{E}|\leq 2g-2.$$ We give a…
Let G be either SU(p,2) with p>=2, Sp(2,R) or SO(p,2) with p>=3. The symmetric spaces associated to these G's are the classical bounded symmetric domains of rank 2, with the exceptions of SO*(8)/U(4) and SO*(10)/U(5). Using the…
We prove a slope 1 stability range for the homology of the symplectic, orthogonal and unitary groups with respect to the hyperbolic form, over any fields other than $F_2$, improving the known range by a factor 2 in the case of finite…
We describe the modulo $2$ de Rham-Witt complex of a field of characteristic $2$, in terms of the powers of the augmentation ideal of the $\mathbb{Z}/2$-geometric fixed points of real topological restriction homology TRR. This is analogous…
In the setting of generalized class field theory, one has a field K with a hyper-class formation C, a complex of G_K-modules that plays the role of a class formation. Letting C(L) denote H^0(G_L, C), there is a distinguished cohomology…
Let G be a simple Lie group of real rank one, and S the ideal boundary of the corresponding symmetric space of noncompact type (H^n_R, H^n_C, H^n_H or H^2_O). We show the finiteness of the possible values of the secondary characteristic…
Let $S$ be a closed oriented surface and $G$ a finite group of orientation preserving automorphisms of $S$ whose orbit space has genus at least $2$. There is a natural group homomorphism from the $G$-centralizer in $Diff^+(S)$ to the…
We generalize the definition of the Toledo invariant for representations of fundamental groups of smooth varieties of general type due to Koziarz and Maubon to the context of singular klt varieties, where the natural fundamental groups to…
In previous works, the universal mapping class group was taken to be the group PPSL(2,Z) of all piecewise PSL(2,Z) homeomorphisms of the unit circle S^1 with finitely many breakpoints among the rational points, and in fact, the Thompson…
In this paper we are going to compute the $ \mathrm{KW} $-Euler classes for rank 2 vector bundles on the classifying stack $ \mathcal{B}N $, where $N$ is the normaliser of the standard torus in $SL_2$ and $\mathrm{KW}$ represents Balmer's…
In this first of a series of three papers we outline an approach to classifying 4d $\mathcal{N}{=}2$ superconformal field theories at rank 2. The classification of allowed scale invariant $\mathcal{N}=2$ Coulomb branch geometries of…
We study the moduli spaces which classify smooth surfaces along with a complex line bundle. There are homological stability and Madsen--Weiss type results for these spaces (mostly due to Cohen and Madsen), and we discuss the cohomological…
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…
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…
We give a new lower bound on the number of connected components of the space of representations of a surface group into the group of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the circle. Precisely, for the fundamental group of a genus g…
Let F be a field of characteristic zero and let f(t,n) be the stabilization homomorphism from the n-th integral homology of SL(t,F) to the n-th homology of SL(t+1,F). We prove the following results: For all n, f(t,n) is an isomorphism if t…