The Birman-Craggs-Johnson homomorphism and abelian cycles in the Torelli group (Q884692)

This well-written but highly technical paper is best summarized by the authors' abstract: In the 1970s, Birman, Craggs and Johnson (BCJ) [\textit{J. S. Birman} and \textit{R. Craggs}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 237, 283--309 (1978; Zbl 0383.57006) and \textit{D. Johnson}, ibid. 261, 235--254 (1980; Zbl 0457.57006)] used Rochlin's invariant for homology 3-spheres to construct a remarkable surjective homomorphism \({\sigma:\mathcal{I}_{g,1}\to B_3}\), where \({\mathcal{I}_{g,1}}\) is the Torelli group and \(B_{3}\) is a certain \(\mathbb F_2\)-vector space of Boolean (square-free) polynomials. By pulling back cohomology classes and evaluating them on abelian cycles, we construct \({2g^4 + O(g^3)}\) dimensions worth of nontrivial elements of \({H^2(\mathcal{I}_{g,1}, \mathbb F_2)}\) which cannot be detected rationally. These classes in fact restrict to nontrivial classes in the cohomology of the subgroup \({\mathcal{K}_{g,1} < \mathcal{I}_{g,1}}\) generated by Dehn twists about separating curves. We also use the ``Casson-Morita algebra'' and Morita's integral lift of the BCJ map restricted to \(\mathcal{K}_{g,1}\) to give the same lower bound on \(H^2(\mathcal{K}_{g,1}, \mathbb Z)\).