The Mumford Relations and the Moduli of Rank Three Stable Bundles

The cohomology ring of the moduli space M(n, d) of semistable bundles of coprime rank n and degree d over a Riemann surface M of genus g ≥ 2 has again proven a rich source of interest in recent years. The rank two, odd degree case is now largely understood. In 1991 Kirwan [8] proved two long standing conjectures due to Mumford and to Newstead and Ramanan. Mumford conjectured that a certain set of relations form a complete set; the Newstead-Ramanan conjecture involved the vanishing of the Pontryagin ring. The Newstead-Ramanan conjecture was independently proven by Thaddeus [15] as a corollary to determining the intersection pairings. As yet though, little work has been done on the cohomology ring in higher rank cases. A simple numerical calculation shows that the Mumford relations themselves are not generally complete when n > 2. However by generalising the methods of [8] and by introducing new relations, in a sense dual to the original relations conjectured by Mumford, we prove results corresponding to the Mumford and Newstead-Ramanan conjectures in the rank three case. Namely we show (§4) that the Mumford relations and these ‘dual’ Mumford relations form a complete set for the rational cohomology ring of M(3, d) and show (§5) that the Pontryagin ring vanishes in degree 12g − 8 and above. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Frances Kirwan and Luke Hatter for their time and comments on this article. I would further like to thank Dr. Alastair King and Dr. Peter Newstead for informing me of their and other recent results.