Bott-Thom isomorphism, Hopf bundles and Morse theory (Q2042163)

Based on Morse theory for the energy functional on path spaces the authors develop a deformation theory for mapping spaces of spheres into orthogonal groups. This is used to show that these mapping spaces are weakly homotopy equivalent, in a stable range, to mapping spaces associated to orthogonal Clifford representations. Given an oriented Euclidean bundle \(V\to X\) of rank divisible by four over a finite complex \(X\) they derive a stable decomposition result for vector bundles over the sphere bundle \({\mathbb S}({\mathbb R}\oplus V)\) in terms of vector bundles and Clifford module bundles over \(X\). After passing to topological \(K\)-theory these results imply classical Bott-Thom isomorphism theorems.