Flat structures on surface bundles

Abstract

We show that there exist flat surface bundles with closed leaves having non-trivial 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.