Secondary Chern-Euler forms and the law of vector fields

Abstract

The Law of Vector Fields is a term coined by Gottlieb for a relative Poincar\'e-Hopf theorem. It was first proved by Morse and expresses the Euler characteristic of a manifold with boundary in terms of the indices of a generic vector field and the inner part of its tangential projection on the boundary. We give two differential-geometric proofs of this topological theorem, in which secondary Chern-Euler forms naturally play an essential role. In the first proof, the main point is to construct a chain away from some singularities. The second proof employs a detailed study of the secondary Chern-Euler form on the boundary, which may be of independent interest. More precisely, we show by explicitly constructing a primitive that, away from the outward and inward unit normal vectors, the secondary Chern-Euler form is exact up to a pullback form. It should be emphasized that we obtain this result in the general case without assuming the metric is locally product near the boundary. In either case, Stokes' theorem is used to complete the proof.