On foliated characteristic classes of transversely symplectic foliations

Kotschick and Morita recently discovered factorisations of characteristic classes of transversely symplectic foliations that yield new characteristic classes in foliated cohomology. We describe an alternative construction of such factorisations and construct examples of topologically trivial foliated ℝ²ⁿ-bundles for which these characteristic classes are non-trivial. This shows that the foliated cohomology classes of Kotschick and Morita carry information that is not merely topological.