K-equivalence in Birational Geometry and Characterizations of Complex Elliptic Genera

Abstract

We show that for smooth complex projective varieties the most general combinations of chern numbers that are invariant under the K-equivalence relation consist of the complex elliptic genera. Combined with a recent result of Totaro, we deduce that up to complex cobordism any K-equivalence can be decomposed into a sequence of classical flops.