Characteristic classes of foliated surface bundles with area-preserving holonomy

Abstract

Making use of the extended flux homomorphism on the group of symplectomorphisms of a closed oriented surface of genus at least 2, we introduce new characteristic classes of foliated surface bundles with symplectic, equivalently area-preserving, total holonomy. These characteristic classes are stable with respect to the genus and we show that they are highly non-trivial. We also prove that the second homology of the group of Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms equipped with the discrete topology is very large.

minor improvements to the exposition; to appear in Journal of Differential Geometry