On the rational homotopical nilpotency index of principal bundles

Abstract

Let $\rm{Aut}(p)$ denote the space of all self-fibre homotopy equivalences of a principal $G$-bundle $p: E\rightarrow X$ of simply connected CW complexes with $E$ finite. When $G$ is a compact connected topological group, we show that there exists an inequality $$n-{\rm N}(p)\leq {\rm Hnil}_{\mathbb{Q}}({\rm{Aut}}(p)_0)\leq n$$ for any space $X$, where $n$ is the number of non-trivial rational homotopy groups of $G$ and ${\rm N}(p)$ is defined in Section 2. In particular, ${\rm Hnil}_{\mathbb{Q}}({\rm{Aut}}(p)_{0})=n$ if $p$ is a fibre-homotopy trivial bundle and X is finite.