A NOTE ON RATIONAL HOMOLOGICAL STABILITY OF AUTOMORPHISMS OF MANIFOLDS

Abstract

Abstract By work of Berglund and Madsen, the rings of rational characteristic classes of fibrations and smooth block bundles with fibre $D^{2n}\sharp (S^n\times S^n)^{\sharp g}$, relative to the boundary, are for $2n\ge 6$ independent of $g$ in degrees $*\le (g-6)/2$. In this note, we explain how this range can be improved to $*\le g-2$ using cohomological vanishing results due to Borel and the classical invariant theory. This implies that the analogous ring for smooth bundles is independent of $g$ in the same range, provided the degree is small compared to the dimension.