Related papers: Tautological characteristic classes II: the Witt c…

Characteristic classes of oriented vector bundles can be identified with cohomology classes of the disjoint union of classifying spaces BSO_n of special orthogonal groups SO_n with n=0,1,... A characteristic class is stable if it extends to…

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…

In [10] it was shown that there is a mapping class group-equivariant deformation retraction of the Teichm\"uller space of a closed surface onto a CW complex with dimension equal to the virtual cohomological dimension of the mapping class…

For a bundle of oriented closed smooth $n$-manifolds $\pi: E \to X$, the tautological class $\kappa_{\mathcal{L}_k} (E) \in H^{4k-n}(X;\mathbb{Q})$ is defined by fibre integration of the Hirzebruch class $\mathcal{L}_k (T_v E)$ of the…

In this paper we show that certain universal homology classes which are fundamental in topology are algebraic. To be specific, the products of Eilenberg-MacLane spaces ${\cal K}_{2q} \equiv K({\Bbb Z},2) \times K({\Bbb Z}, 4) \times ...…

The moduli space of stable vector bundles on a Riemann surface is smooth when the rank and degree are coprime, and is diffeomorphic to the space of unitary connections of central constant curvature. A classic result of Newstead and…

We prove the rigidity of Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ and $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ quantum representations of mapping class groups at all prime levels for closed surfaces of genus at least $7$. The proof relies on Ocneanu rigidity of…

The purpose of this article is two-fold: We first give a more elementary proof of a recent theorem of Korkmaz, Monden, and the author, which states that the commutator length of the n-th power of a Dehn twist along a boundary parallel curve…

We have recently proved a homological stability theorem for moduli spaces of r-Spin Riemann surfaces, which in particular implies a Madsen--Weiss theorem for these moduli spaces. This allows us to effectively study their stable cohomology,…

We consider the moduli space of flat $SO(2n+1)$-connections (up to gauge transformations) on a Riemann surface, with fixed holonomy around a marked point. There are natural line bundles over this moduli space; we construct geometric…

We study the character variety of representations of the fundamental group of a closed surface of genus $g\geq2$ into the Lie group SO(n,n+1) using Higgs bundles. For each integer $0<d\leq n(2g-2),$ we show there is a smooth connected…

We prove a general uniformization theorem for N=2 superconformal and N=1 superanalytic DeWitt super-Riemann surfaces, showing that in general an N=2 superconformal (resp. N=1 superanalytic) DeWitt super-Riemann surface is N=2…

Let $q$ be an odd prime power, and $G=\text{Sp}(2n,q)$ the finite symplectic group. We give an expression for the total Stiefel-Whitney Classes (SWCs) for orthogonal representations $\pi$ of $G$, in terms of character values of $\pi$ at…

Let $K$ be a finite extension of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ and $X$ a smooth proper $K$-variety with good reduction. Under a mild assumption on the behaviour of Hodge numbers under reduction modulo $p$, we prove that the existence of a non-zero global…

We study the second cohomology group with coefficients in the adjoint module for a class of solvable Lie algebras $\mathcal{R}_{\mathcal{T}}$ that arise as maximal solvable extensions of nilpotent Lie algebras $\mathcal{N}$ of maximal rank.…

The moduli space of stable bundles of rank 2 and degree 1 on a Riemann surface has rational cohomology generated by the so-called universal classes. The work of Baranovsky, King-Newstead, Siebert-Tian and Zagier provided a complete set of…

We prove that the mapping class group $\Gamma_{g,n}$ for surfaces of negative Euler characteristic has a cofinite universal space $\E$ for proper actions (the resulting quotient is a finite $CW$-complex). The approach is to construct a…

Let $G$ be a simply connected semi-simple complex algebraic group. Fix a maximal torus $T$ and a Borel subgroup $B$ such that $T\subset B\subset G$. Let $W$ the Weyl group of $G$ relative to $T$. For any $w$ in $W$, let $X_w=\bar {BwB/B}$…

For a proper smooth variety of even dimension over a field of characteristic different from 2 or l, the second Stiefel-Whitney class of the l-adic cohomology and the second Hasse-Witt class of the de Rham cohomology are both defined in the…

Every homomorphism from finite index subgroups of a universal lattices to mapping class groups of orientable surfaces (possibly with punctures), or to outer automorphism groups of finitely generated nonabelian free groups must have finite…