A degeneration of the moduli space of stable bundles (Q762229)

In the present paper the author has two aims: 1. He develops a method for investigating the topology of the smooth projective variety \(U_ Y\) of isomorphism classes of stable bundles of rank two and degree d (d is odd) on a smooth projective curve of genus \(g\geq 2\); 2. As an application of the above method he proves the following conjecture of Newstead and Ramanan: ''The k-th Chern class of the tangent bundle of \(U_ Y\) is zero in the De Rham cohomology of \(U_ Y\) if \(k>2g-2\) (the ground field is the field of complex numbers).''