Floer homology of families. I. (Q2426840)

The aim of the paper under review is to study certain homotopy invariants of families of equivalent objects parametrized by a smooth manifold \(B\). The author gives a Morse theoretical interpretation for the Leray-Serre spectral sequence of the fibre bundle. Let \(Z\) be a fibre bundle over \(B\) with a smooth function \(f: Z \to\mathbb R\). The main principle in this paper is to understand the Floer-type homology of \(Z\) in terms of the parametrized manifold \(B\) and the fibrewise Floer-type homology of \(Z_b\) for \(b \in B\), as a spectral sequence with \(E^2_{i, j} = H_i(B, HF_j(Z))\), where \(HF_*(Z)\) is a fibrewise Floer-type homology. This spectral sequence satisfies homotopy invariance, naturality, triaviality and Poincaré duality. Examples are given in Section 1.3. In Section 2, the author gives a review of the Morse complex. The first construction of families of Morse functions is to define a family of admissible smooth functions \(f_b: Z_b \to\mathbb R\) for each \(b\in B\). When \(f_b\) is Morse, the homology can be defined; when \(f_b\) is not Morse, there are arbitrarily bad singularities. The method is to define a smooth admissible cube \(\sigma: [-1, 1]^i \to B\) whenever \(b\in B\) is the center of a face of \(\sigma\) and \(f_b\) is Morse, and to take the corresponding horizontal lifting of a vector field. This gives a bigraded chain complex with one grading from the \(i\)-th cube and the other from the Morse index. The basic properties are given in Section 4 and the proofs follow from Morse theory and algebraic topology techniques. In Section 5, the author compares his construction with the Leray-Serre spectral sequence to show that the method in this paper gives a Morse theoretical proof of the Leray-Serre spectral sequence in Theorem 5.1. When the base parameters \(B\) is a closed manifold, then one can replace the cubic construction by a Morse function on \(B\) to give the spectral sequence in Section 6 as before. Section 7 and Section 8 explain the Poincaré duality and the filtered chain homotopy type with generalized Morse theory-Novikov homology in Section 9. The genericity and transversality are given in the last Section 10. It would be interesting to know the precise change when \(f_b\) is not Morse, or to give a explicit description of the Cerf theory from this point of view.