Some phenomena in tautological rings of manifolds (Q1783994)

The author proves several basic ring-theoretic results about the rings of generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford classes for fibre bundles with fibre the closed manifold \(W\). These rings have been studied, for simpler manifolds \(W\), by \textit{I. Grigoriev} [Geom. Topol. 21, No. 4, 2015--2048 (2017; Zbl 1370.55005)] and by \textit{S. Galatius} et al. [Compos. Math. 153, No. 4, 851--866 (2017; Zbl 1371.57023)]. Let \(\pi: E\rightarrow B\) be a smooth fibre bundle with fibre \(W^d\), with an orientation of the vertical tangent bundle \(T_{\pi}E\). For each characteristic class \(c \in H^{k}(B\)SO\((d))\) of oriented \(d\)-dimensional vector bundles, we form \[ \kappa_c(\pi)=\int_\pi c(T_{\pi}E)\in H^{k-d}(B), \] the generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford class associated to \(c\). This construction may be used to the universal such fiber bundle, whose base space is the classifying space \(B\)Diff\(^{+}(W^d)\) of the topological group of orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms of \(W^d\), to give universal characteristic classes \(\kappa_c \in H^{\ast}(B\)Diff\(^{+}(W^d))\). The author works in cohomology with rational coefficients. He defines the tautological ring \(R^{\ast}(W)\), contained in \(H^{\ast}(B\)Diff\(^{+}(W); {\mathbb Q})\), to be the subring generated by all classes \(\kappa_c\). His goal is to describe some quantitative and qualitative properties of these rings, for certain manifolds \(W\). Before doing so, he introduces some variants, namely the tautological ring fixing a point, \(R^{\ast}(W,*)\), contained in \(H^*(B\)Diff\(^{+}(W,*); {\mathbb Q})\), and the tautological ring fixing a disc, \(R^{\ast}(W,D^d)\), contained in \(H^*(B\)Diff\(^{+}(W,D^d); {\mathbb Q})\). He only considers even-dimensional manifolds. His most important result is the following. Theorem A. Let \(W\) be a closed smooth oriented \(2n\)-manifold, and assume that either (H1) \(H^{\ast}(W; {\mathbb Q})\) is non-zero only in even degrees, or (H2) \(H^{\ast}(W; {\mathbb Q})\) is non-zero only in degrees \(0,\,\, 2n\) and odd degrees, and \(\chi(W)\neq 0\). Then (i) \(R^{\ast}(W)\) is a finitely-generated \( {\mathbb Q}\)-algebra, and (ii) \(R^{\ast}(W,*)\) is a finitely-generated \(R^{\ast}(W)\)-module. His second main result (Corollary B in the Introduction; the general statement is Theorem 3.1) is a general technique for estimating the Krull dimension of the rings \(R^{\ast}(W)\) from below, in terms of torus actions on \(W\). In the last section, the author exhibits several phenomena in tautological rings (for instance, in a result complementary to Theorem A, he shows that the hypotheses of that theorem cannot be completely removed).