On negatively curved bundles with hyperbolic fibers outside the Igusa stable range

Abstract

We prove that the Teichm\"{u}ller space $\mathcal{T}^{<0}(M)$ of negatively curved metrics on a hyperbolic manifold $M$ has nontrivial $i$-th rational homotopy groups for some $i> \dim M$. Moreover, some elements of infinite order in $\pi_i B\mbox{Diff}(M)$ can be represented by bundles over $S^i$ with fiberwise negatively curved metrics.