On Kontsevich's characteristic classes for higher dimensional sphere bundles. I: The simplest class (Q1022334)

In Section 2 of [``Feynman diagrams and low-dimensional topology,'' in: Joseph, A. (ed.) et al., First European congress of mathematics (ECM), Paris, France, July 6--10, 1992. Volume II: Invited lectures (Part 2). Basel: Birkhäuser. Prog. Math. 120, 97--121 (1994; Zbl 0872.57001)], \textit{M. Kontsevich} constructed -- as an application of his graph homology and the technique of the configuration space integral -- a kind of universal characteristic classes for smooth fibre bundles with fibre diffeomorphic to a singularly framed odd-dimensional rational homology sphere of dimension at least \(3\). If the fibre is \(3\)-dimensional, then the Kontsevich classes for \(3\)-valent graphs are known to give diffeomorphism invariants of homology \(3\)-spheres. In the paper under review, the author describes in detail the simplest Kontsevich cohomology class \(\zeta_2\in H^{2k-2}(B;\mathbb Z)\) for framed smooth fibre bundles over a base space \(B\), with fibre a \((2k+1)\)-dimensional integral homology sphere \(M\) (that is, \(M\) is a smooth closed \((2k+1)\)-manifold such that \(H_*(M;\mathbb Z)\cong H_*(S^{2k+1};\mathbb Z)\)). The class \(\zeta_2\) is associated with the graph that consists of two vertices and three edges connecting these vertices. By introducing a correction term -- a multiple of Hirzebruch's signature defect -- to the characteristic number \(\langle \zeta_2, [S^{2k-2}]\rangle\in \mathbb Z\) (where \([S^{2k-2}]\in H_{2k-2} (S^{2k-2};\mathbb Z)\) is the fundamental class) of the Kontsevich class \(\zeta_2\), the author obtains a rational invariant \(\widehat{Z}_2\) of unframed \(S^{2k+1}\)-bundles over the sphere \(S^{2k-2}\). He also establishes a relation of this invariant to Milnor's \(\lambda'\)-invariant [\textit{J. W. Milnor}, Differentiable manifolds which are homotopy spheres. Princeton University, 39 p. (1959; Zbl 0106.37001)]; as a corollary, \(\widehat{Z}_2\) is non-trivial for many fibre dimensions. Thanks to this, the author finds some new ``exotic'' nontrivial subspaces of the rational homotopy group \(\pi_{2k-2}(B\operatorname {Diff}(S^{2k+1}))\otimes \mathbb Q \cong \pi_{2k-3}(\text{Diff}(S^{2k+1}))\otimes \mathbb Q\) for many values of \(k\) \((k = 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, \dots)\). Here \(\text{Diff}(S^{2k+1})\) is the infinite-dimensional Lie group of self-diffeomorphisms of the sphere \(S^{2k+1}\).