The age grading and the Chen-Ruan cup product

Abstract

We prove that the obstruction bundle used to define the cup-product in Chen-Ruan cohomology is determined by the so-called `age grading' or `degree-shifting numbers'. Indeed, the obstruction bundle can be directly computed using the age grading. We obtain a Kunneth Theorem for Chen-Ruan cohomology as a direct consequence of an elementary property of the age grading, and explain how several other results - including associativity of the cup-product - can be proved in a similar way.