Secondary Chern-Euler forms and the law of vector fields

DOI10.1090/S0002-9939-2011-11214-0MaRDI QIDQ2880670zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 13 April 2012

Published in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4754

Law of Vector Fields secondary Chern-Euler forms singularities Stokes' theorem

Characteristic classes and numbers in differential topology (57R20) Vector fields, frame fields in differential topology (57R25)

Abstract: The Law of Vector Fields is a term coined by Gottlieb for a relative Poincar'e-Hopf theorem. It was first proved by Morse and expresses the Euler characteristic of a manifold with boundary in terms of the indices of a generic vector field and the inner part of its tangential projection on the boundary. We give two differential-geometric proofs of this topological theorem, in which secondary Chern-Euler forms naturally play an essential role. In the first proof, the main point is to construct a chain away from some singularities. The second proof employs a detailed study of the secondary Chern-Euler form on the boundary, which may be of independent interest. More precisely, we show by explicitly constructing a primitive that, away from the outward and inward unit normal vectors, the secondary Chern-Euler form is exact up to a pullback form. It should be emphasized that we obtain this result in the general case without assuming the metric is locally product near the boundary. In either case, Stokes' theorem is used to complete the proof.

Review text

In this paper the author gives two differential-geometric proofs of an equation called the Law of Vector Fields, which is a Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, stating that the total index of a vector field is equal to the Euler characteristic. More precisely, if \(V\) is a smooth vector field on a compact oriented Riemannian manifold \(X\) with boundary \(M\), then NEWLINE\[NEWLINE\mathrm{Ind}\, V + \mathrm{Ind}\, \partial_-V=\chi(X)NEWLINE\]NEWLINE where \(\partial_-V\) denotes the restriction of the projection of \(V|M\) onto \(TM\) along the normal direction to the part of \(M\) on which \(V\) is pointing inward. The key to the approach here is using a differential form \(\Phi\) on the tangent sphere bundle \(STX\) constructed in Chern's proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem such that it satisfies the relation \(d\Phi=-\pi^*\Omega\), where \(\pi^*\Omega\) is the pull back of the Euler curvature form \(\Omega\) of \(X\) (which is defined to be zero when \(\dim X\) is odd) to \(STX\) by the natural projection \(\pi : STX \to X\). This paper starts with the observation that proving the above formula is equivalent to proving the following: NEWLINE\[NEWLINE\int_{\overrightarrow{n}(M)}\Phi - \int_{\alpha_V(M)}\Phi = \mathrm{Ind}\, \partial_-VNEWLINE\]NEWLINE where \(\overrightarrow{n}\) denotes the outward unit normal vector field of \(M\) and \({\alpha_V(M)}\) the vector field \(V\) of \(M\) rescaled by setting \(\alpha_V(x)=V(x)/|V(x)|\) on \(M\) (here let \(V\) be assumed to be nowhere vanishing on \(M\), but there is no loss of generality in doing so). Thus this new formula becomes a focal point of this paper, so that the main part of the paper is devoted to the proof of this formula where it is carried out in two ways.

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