# “Symmetric” Polynomial 4-cocycles

It is an old theorem of Heaton's (based on work of Eilenberg and MacLane), that a polynomial 3-cocycle $f(x,y,z)$ which is "symmetric," in the sense that $f(x,y,z)-f(x,z,y)+f(z,x,y)=0$, is always a coboundary. Does anyone know of a similar theorem for polynomial 4-cocycles? The proof of the theorem for 3-cocycles doesn't seem to be written down in one clear piece anywhere, so I've had a tough time just generalizing it, thus a good reference for a modern treatment of even that case would be much appreciated as well.

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What is this cocycle living on? (I don't do any topology, but I have done a fair bit of naive Hochschild cohomology.) I guess from your tags that this is a cocycle on a not-necessarily abelian-group taking values in the augmentation module, but what is a polynomial cocycle? –  Yemon Choi Jul 12 '13 at 8:04
It comes up in connection with formal group laws. For example, Lazard's lemma for symmetric polynomial $2$-cocycles. Definition: For an abelian group $A$, a symmetric 2-cocycle is a “polynomial” $P(x,y) \in A[x, y] = A \otimes_{\mathbb{Z}} \mathbb{Z}[x, y]$ with $P(x, y) = P(y,x)$ and $P(x, y+z) + P(y, z) = P(x,y) + P(x+y, z)$. –  Dietrich Burde Jul 12 '13 at 8:45
@YemonChoi So, it's living in something like the cobar construction on $R[x]$, or you can think of it as being in $H^*(\mathbb{G}_a,\mathbb{G}_a)$ where the first is a monoid acting trivially on the module on the right, as described by Demazure and Gabriel. I don't really know of another way to place polynomial cocycles inside of some Hochschild cohomology. –  Jon Beardsley Jul 12 '13 at 14:17

Heaton showed that if the field $K$ has characteristic zero, then all polynomial cocycles are coboundaries. In characteristic $p$ this is not always the case, but the following result holds (which you may know already).
THEOREM: For $n> 2$ and $K$ a field of characteristic $p$, every polynomial $n$-cocycle over $K$ of degree less than $p$ in the first indeterminate and less than $p-1$ in the second is a coboundary.
For a modern application, see for example chapter $1$ on formal groups (and symmetric polynomial cocycles) in the lecture notes on Shimura Varieties (class of Robert Kottwitz), see http://www.math.ou.edu/~sspallone/ under "Other Writings".