Cyclic-Homology Chern–Weil Theory for Families of Principal Coactions

Viewing the space of cotraces in the structural coalgebra of a principal coaction as a noncommutative counterpart of the classical Cartan model, we construct the cyclic-homology Chern–Weil homomorphism. To realize the thus constructed Chern–Weil homomorphism as a Cartan model of the homomorphism tautologically induced by the classifying map on cohomology, we replace the unital subalgebra of coaction-invariants by its natural H-unital nilpotent extension (row extension). Although the row-extension algebra provides a drastically different model of the cyclic object, we prove that, for any row extension of any unital algebra over a commutative ring, the row-extension Hochschild complex and the usual Hochschild complex are chain homotopy equivalent. It is the discovery of an explicit homotopy formula that allows us to improve the homological quasi-isomorphism arguments of Loday and Wodzicki. We work with families of principal coactions, and instantiate our noncommutative Chern–Weil theory by computing the cotrace space and analyzing a dimension-drop-like effect in the spirit of Feng and Tsygan for the quantum-deformation family of the standard quantum Hopf fibrations.