Commutative cocycles and stable bundles over surfaces

Abstract

Commutative K-theory, a cohomology theory built from spaces of commuting matrices, has been explored in recent work of Adem, Gómez, Gritschacher, Lind, and Tillman. In this article, we use unstable methods to construct explicit representatives for the real commutative K-theory classes on surfaces. These classes arise from commutative O(2)-valued cocycles, and are analyzed via the point-wise inversion operation on commutative cocycles.

26 pages. Minor revisions. This version has been accepted for publication in Forum Math