Flat structures on surface bundles

Abstract

We show that there exist flat surface bundles with closed leaves having nontrivial normal bundles. This leads us to compute the abelianisation of surface diffeomorphism groups with marked points. We also extend a formula of Tsuboi that expresses the Euler class of a flat circle bundle in terms of the Calabi invariant of certain Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms to surfaces of higher genus and derive a similar formula for the first MMM–class of surface bundles with punctured fibre.