The Chow ring of the classifying space $BSO(2n,{\mathbb C})$

Abstract

We compute the Chow ring of the classifying space $BSO(2n,\C)$ in the sense of Totaro using the fibration $Gl(2n)/SO(2n) \to BSO(2n) \to BGl(2n)$ and a computation of the Chow ring of $Gl(2n)/SO(2n)$ in a previous paper. We find this Chow ring is generated by Chern classes and a characteristic class defined by Edidin and Graham which maps to $2^{n-1}$ times the Euler class under the usual class map from the Chow ring to ordinary cohomology. Moreover, we show this class represents $1/2^{n-1}(n-1)!$ times the $n^{th}$ Chern class of the representation of SO(2n) whose highest weight vector is twice that of the half-spin representation.