A general construction of partial Grothendieck transformations

Abstract

Fulton and MacPherson introduced the notion of bivariant theories and Grothendieck transformations related to Riemann-Roch-theorems. But there are many situations, where such a bivariant theory or a corresponding Grothendieck transformation is only partially known: characteristic classes of singular spaces (e.g. Stiefel-Whitney or Chern classes), cohomology operations (e.g. singular Adams Riemann-Roch and Steenrod operations for Chow groups) or equivariant theories (e.g. Lefschetz Riemann-Roch). We introduce in this paper a simpler notion of partial (weak) bivariant theories and partial Grothendieck transformations, which applies to all these examples. Our main theorem shows, that a natural transformation of covariant theories, which commutes with exterior products, automatically extends (uniquely) to such a partial Grothendieck transformation of suitable partial (weak) bivariant theories ! In the above geometric situations one has for example to consider only morphisms, whose target is a smooth manifold, or more generally, a suitable homology manifold.