Witt groups of sheaves on topological spaces (Q2427587)

The paper studies the Witt groups of triangulated categories of sheaves of modules equipped with Poincaré-Verdier duality. In particular, the Witt groups of triangulated categories of cohomologically constructible complexes of sheaves on polyhedra are shown to give rise to a generalised homology theory for polyhedra and continuous mappings. Under certain restrictions on the base ring \(R\) and assuming the polyhera are finite, these constructible Witt groups are identified with Ranicki's free symmetric L-groups. Moreover, when \(R\) is the rationals, relations are found to the 4-periodic colimit of bordism groups of PL Witt spaces. As an application, the author interprets the L-classes of singular spaces as stable homology operations from Witt groups to rational homology, answering thus a question raised in Borel's book on intersection cohomology.