Combinatorial Miller-Morita-Mumford classes and Witten cycles (Q1880640)

This is a lengthy paper (47 pages) aimed at showing a conjecture of Witten relating the Miller-Morita-Mumford classes to a class of cycles in the space of fat graphs. Let \(M_g\) be the mapping class group, the group of isotopy classes of orientation preserving diffeomorphisms on a genus \(g\) Riemann surface and \(M_g^s\) the mapping class group on a surface with \(s\geq 1\) boundary components (which may be rotated and permuted). The Miller-Morita-Mumford characteristic classes, \(\kappa_k\), are defined in \(H^{2k}(M_g;\mathbb{Z})\). The adjusted Miller-Morita-Mumford classes, \(\widetilde\kappa_k\in H^{2k}(M^s_g;\mathbb{Z})\), are the classes \(\kappa_k\) minus a correction term consisting of the push down of a power of the Euler class of an oriented circle bundle. The category of fat graphs consists of finite connected graphs in which every vertex has valence at least 3 along with a cyclic ordering of the edges incident to each vertex. Each fat graph is equal to the core of a connected oriented punctured surface. Let \(\text{Fat}_g^s\) be the full subcategory of fat graphs consisting of graphs which correspond to surfaces of genus \(g\) with \(s\) punctures. If \(\text{Fat}_g^s\) is nonempty its geometric realization is homotopy equivalent to the classifying space of \(M_g^s\). Let \(W_k\) be the full subcategory of fat graphs having a vertex with valence at least \(2k+ 3\). The realization, \(\text{W}_k\), of \(W_k\), the Witten cycle, is a codimension \(2k\) subset of the realization of Fat whose dual \([\text{W}_k]^*\) is a well-defined cohomology class of the mapping class group. An elementary combinatorial cocycle represented \(\widetilde\kappa_k\) is constructed and evaluated on \([\text{W}_k]\) to show the main result of this paper: In \(H^{2k}(M_g^s; \mathbb{Q})\) \[ \widetilde\kappa_k= (-1)^{k+1}{(k+ 1)!\over (2k+ 2)!} [W_k]^*. \] M. Kontsevich constructed other cycles in the space of fat graphs. As a corollary an explicit expression is given for the duals of the Kontsevich cycles as polynomials in these adjusted Miller-Morita-Mumford classes.