Realification of stably trivial vector bundles

Abstract

The set of stably trivial complex vector bundles over complex projective spaces and spheres has a natural group structure when the corank is small enough. With respect to this group structure, the operations of taking the underlying real vector bundle (realification) and of adding a trivial line bundle (stabilisation), are group homomorphisms. Building on Hu's recent enumerations of stably trivial complex bundles, we compute these homomorphisms in a range by using Weiss calculus to translate the problem to stable homotopy theory.