Equivariant, string and leading order characteristic classes associated to fibrations (Q2439280)

The paper under review focuses on leading order classes and string characteristic classes of some infinite rank bundles associated to loop spaces, Gromov-Witten theory and gauge theory. Concretely, let \(\pi: M\to B\) be a fibration of closed manifolds with fibration \(Z\) and let \(E\to M\) be a vector bundle over \(B\) with a connection \(\nabla\). One obtains an infinite rank bundle \(\mathcal{E}\to B\) over \(B\) with a connection \(\nabla'\) by pushing down the vector bundle \(E\), and can define the associated leading order Chern classes/characters and string classes/characters of \(\mathcal{E}\), cf. Section 2 for details. In Section 3, the authors consider the loop space \(\mathcal{L}M\) of a closed oriented Riemannian \(n\)-manifold \(M\), relate leading order Chern classes on \(\mathcal{L}M\) to the corresponding characteristic classes on \(M\), and restate the \(\mathbb S^1\)-equivariant index theorem. In Section 4, they relate string classes and leading order Chern classes to genus zero Gromov-Witten theory of semipositive symplectic manifolds. The methods used in the paper avoid using the compactifications \(\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{0,k}(A)\) of the usual moduli spaces \(\mathcal{M}_{0,k}(A)\) and hence the construction of the well-known virtual fundamental classs (VFCs). In Section 5, the authors consider the loop group \(\Omega G\) of a compact Lie group \(G\) and prove that the cohomology groups \(H^\ast(\Omega G;\mathbb R)\) of \(\Omega G\) with real coefficients are generated by Chern-Simon string classes or by a pushforward of leading order Chern-Simon classes. In the last section, the authors relate Donaldson invariants to leading order currents.