Characteristic classes for curves of genus one (Q887908)

The author studies the cohomology of the Artin stack \(M_1\) parametrizing genus one curves \textit{without} a marked point. There is an obvious forgetful functor \(M_{1,1} \to M_1\), which has a left inverse \(J : M_1 \to M_{1,1}\) assigning to a genus one curve its Jacobian. With coefficients in \(\mathbb Q\) or even \(\mathbb Z[1/6]\) it is very easy to compute the cohomology of \(M_1\) using the Leray spectral sequence for \(J\) and the fact that the fiber of \(J\) over an elliptic curve \(E\) is the classifying stack \(BE\). The author therefore focuses on torsion, and computes the cohomology with \(\mathbb Z[1/2]\) degrees completely and with \(\mathbb Z\) coefficients in low degrees. The cohomology of \(M_{1,1}\) is a direct summand of the cohomology of \(M_1\) and the author refers to the complement as ``dagger classes''. The dagger classes are cohomological obstructions to the existence of rational points on genus one curves, and the author investigates questions concerning vanishing and nonvanishing of these characteristic classes over various base schemes. Rationally, every class in positive degree is of course a dagger class. The author observes that for the natural mixed Hodge structure on \(H^k(M_1,\mathbb Q)\) each class has weight \(<k\), so for a family of genus one curves over a smooth base these characteristic classes will always vanish by Deligne's weight bounds. However, the author constructs explicitly singular schemes over which they are nonzero. The author also studies the \(\pmod 2\) cohomology, and shows that in this case the dagger classes can be nonzero also over smooth bases.