Paper detail

On Sha's secondary Chern-Euler class

For a manifold with boundary, the restriction of Chern's transgression form of the Euler curvature form over the boundary is closed. Its cohomology class is called the secondary Chern-Euler class and used by Sha to formulate a relative Poincaré-Hopf theorem, under the condition that the metric on the manifold is locally product near the boundary. We show that the secondary Chern-Euler form is exact away from the outward and inward unit normal vectors of the boundary by explicitly constructing a transgression form. Using Stokes' theorem, this evaluates the boundary term in Sha's relative Poincaré-Hopf theorem in terms of more classical indices of the tangential projection of a vector field. This evaluation in particular shows that Sha's relative Poincaré-Hopf theorem is equivalent to the more classical Law of Vector Fields.