Abelianized obstruction for fixed points of fiber-preserving maps of surface bundles (Q1039206)

Obstruction theory has been used to study problems of fix point theory; for fiber-preserving maps the theory was developed in \textit{E. Fadell} and \textit{S. Husseini} [in: Fixed point theory, Proc. Conf., Sherbrooke/Can. 1980, Lect. Notes Math. 886, 49--72 (1981; Zbl 0485.55002)] when the fibre is supposed to be a manifold with dimension greater than two. In the paper under review the authors study the abelianized obstruction for fibre-preserving self-maps \(f:M\to M\) where \(S\to M\to B\) is a bundle which fiber \(S\) a surface. In that case the vanishing of the obstruction is only a necessary condition to obtain a fiber-preserving homotopy that deforms the map \(f\) to a fixed point free map. The authors use Fox calculus and prove that the vanishing of the obstruction is equivalent to the existence of solutions to some system of equations. Some particular cases are presented, especially when \(S\) is the Klein bottle.