Novikov homology, jump loci and Massey products
Let X be a finite CW complex, and ρ: π 1(X) → GL(l, ℂ) a representation. Any cohomology class α ∈ H 1(X, ℂ) gives rise to a deformation γ t of ρ defined by γ t (g) = ρ(g) exp(t〈α, g〉). We show that the cohomology of X with local coefficients γ gen corresponding to the generic point of the curve γ is computable from a spectral sequence starting from H*(X, ρ). We compute the differentials of the spectral sequence in terms of the Massey products and show that the spectral sequence degenerates in case...