Asymptotic properties of MMM-classes

Abstract

We study geometric properties of characteristic classes of surfaces bundles. In particular, we show that oriented surface bundles over bases with amenable fundamental groups and dimension at least 2 have trivial simplicial volume. We show furthermore that all MMM-classes are hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov, verifying a weakened version of a conjecture due to Morita. Finally we consider surface bundles over products and restrictions on their characteristic classes