Flat bundles and commutator lengths

Abstract

The purpose of this article is two-fold: We first give a more elementary proof of a recent theorem of Korkmaz, Monden, and the author, which states that the commutator length of the n-th power of a Dehn twist along a boundary parallel curve on a surface with boundary S of genus g at least two is the floor of (|n|+3)/2 in the mapping class group of S. The alternative proof we provide goes through push maps and Morita's use of Milnor-Wood inequalities, in particular it does not appeal to gauge theory. In turn, we produce infinite families of pairwise non-homotopic 4-manifolds admitting genus g surface bundles over genus h surfaces with distinguished sections which are flat but admit no flat connections for which the sections are flat, for every fixed pairs of integers g and h at least two. The latter result generalizes a theorem of Bestvina, Church, and Souto, and allows us to obtain a simple proof of Morita's non-lifting theorem (for an infinite family of non-conjugate subgroups) in the case of marked surfaces.