The de Rham-Federer theory of differential characters and character duality (Q4454887)

The authors present a self-contained formulation of the theory of differential characters based on special currents, called \textit{sparks}, which they christen the de Rham-Federer theory after the early work appearing in [\textit{H. Federer}, Geometric measure theory. New York: Springer Verlag (1969; Zbl 0176.00801)]. This theory gives a unification and extension of the results of Gillet-Soulé and B. Harris. A spark on a manifold \(X\) is a de Rham current \(a\) whose exterior derivative may be decomposed as \(da = \phi - R\) where \(\phi\) is smooth and \(R\) is integrally flat. The key fact about this decomposition is that it is unique. Therefore a spark has two differentials \(d_{1}a = \phi\) and \(d_{2}a = R\). Two sparks \(a_{1}\) and \(a_{2}\) are equivalent if \(a_{1}= a_{2} + db + S\) where \(b\) is any current and \(S\) is integrally flat. The spark equivalence classes form the space of characters \(\widehat{{\mathbf H}}^{*}(X)\) and the differentials give two fundamental exact sequences \[ 0 \longrightarrow \widehat{{\mathbf H}}^{k}_{\infty}(X) \longrightarrow \widehat{{\mathbf H}}^{k}(X) \longrightarrow H^{k+1}(X ; {\mathbf Z}) \longrightarrow 0 \] and \[ 0 \longrightarrow H^{k}(X ; S^{1}) \longrightarrow \widehat{{\mathbf H}}^{k}(X) \longrightarrow Z_{0}^{k+1}(X) \longrightarrow 0 . \] The authors show that the theory of differential characters behaves like a homology-cohomology theory having a product, Thom homomorphisms, Gysin maps and Alexander-Lefschetz duality. The main new result is the derivation of a type of Poincaré duality theorem, which is proved via a sort of transversality theorem for flat and rectifiable currents. Finally, the authors show that there is a product-preserving equivalence of functors from de Rham-Federer theory to the classical Chern-Simons theory.