Abstract. We study an analogue of fibrations of topological spaces with the homotopy lifting property in the setting of C * -algebra bundles. We then derive an analogue of the Leray-Serre spectral sequence to compute the K-theory of the fibration in terms of the cohomology of the base and the K-theory of the fibres. We present many examples which show that fibrations with noncommutative fibres appear in abundance in nature.
IntroductionIn recent years the study of the topological properties of C*-algebra bundles plays a more and more prominent rôle in the field of Operator algebras. The main reason for this is two-fold: on one side there are many important examples of C*-algebras which do come with a canonical bundle structure. On the other side, the study of C*-algebra bundles over a locally compact Hausdorff base space X is the natural next step in classification theory, after the far reaching results which have been obtained in the classification of simple C*-algebras. To fix notation, by a C*-algebra bundle A(X) over X we shall simply mean a C 0 (X)-algebra in the sense of Kasparov (see [17]): it is a C*-algebra A together with a non-degenerate * -homomorphismwhere ZM(A) denotes the center of the multiplier algebra M(A) of A. For such C 0 (X)-algebra A, the fibre over x ∈ X is then A x = A/I x , where I x = {Φ(f ) · a; a ∈ A and f ∈ C 0 (X) such that f (x) = 0}, and the canonical quotient map q x : A → A x is called the evaluation map at x. We shall often write A(X) to indicate the given C 0 (X)-structure of A. We shall recall the basic constructions and properties of C 0 (X)-algebras in the preliminary section below. We refer to [8] for further notations concerning C 0 (X)-algebras.The main problem when studying bundles from the topological point of view is to provide good topological invariants which help to understand the local and global structure of the bundles. A good example is given by the class of separable continuous-trace C*-algebras, which are, up to Morita equivalence, just the section algebras of locally trivial bundles over X with fibres the compact This work was partially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 478).