Milnor-Wood inequalities for manifolds locally isometric to a product of hyperbolic planes (Q931812)

In the present note, the authors describe Milnor-Wood inequalities for the Euler number of flat oriented vector bundles over closed Riemannian manifolds locally isometric to products of hyperbolic planes. One consequence is that such manifolds do not admit an affine structure, confirming Chern-Sullivan's conjecture in this case. The manifolds under consideration are of particular interest, since, contrary to some other locally symmetric spaces, they admit interesting flat vector bundles in the corresponding dimension. When the manifold is irreducible and of higher rank, then it is shown that flat oriented vector bundles are determined completely by the sign of the Euler number.