Cohomology of flat bundles and a Chern-Simons functional

Abstract

We show that a flat principal bundle with compact connected structure group and its adjoint bundles of Lie groups have the same cohomology as the trivial bundle, which is done by proving they satisfy the condition for the Leray-Hirsch theorem. This information has been used to construct a cohomology class of the adjoint bundle of a flat bundle whose restriction to each fiber is the class of the Maurer-Cartan 3-form. Then we use this result to define an invariant of a gauge transformation of a flat bundle which describes the effect of the gauge transformation on a Chern-Simons functional.