Coincidences of multiple fibre-preserving maps (Q2661697)

Let \(X \to M \to B \) and \(Y\to N \to B\) be smooth fibre bundles and \(f_1,f_2,\dots , f_k:M\to N\) fibre-preserving maps. The authors study the question whether it is possible to deform these maps by a fibre-preserving homotopy over \(B\) to maps \(f_1', f_2', \dots ,f_k':M\to N\) such that their coincidence set: \[\{ x\in M \mid f_1'(x)=f_2'(x)=\cdots =f_k'(x) \}\] is empty. The problem is translated into a problem of existence of a global section of a certain fibre bundle. Then the techniques of obstruction theory are applied. An example is given of three maps \(f_1,f_2,f_3:S^1\times S^3 \to S^1\times S^2\) over \(S^1\) (trivial bundles), which are deformable to be coincidence free, but the pairs \(f_1,f_2\) and \(f_1,f_3\) cannot be deformed by a fibrewise homotopy to be coincidence free.