Remarks on Collino cycles and hyperelliptic Johnson homomorphisms

A Collino cycle is a higher cycle on the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve. The universal family of Collino cycles naturally gives rise to a normal function, whose induced monodromy relates to the hyperelliptic Johnson homomorphism. Colombo computed this monodromy explicitly and made this relation precise. We recast this in the perspective of relative completion. In particular, we use Colombo’s result to construct Collino classes, which are cohomology classes of hyperelliptic mapping class groups with coefficients in a certain symplectic representation. We also determine the dimension of their span in the case of the level two hyperelliptic mapping class group.