For a Serre fibration over , cover the base by a contractible punctured sphere and a contractible ball. Excision relative to the preimage of the punctured sphere identifies the relative pair with the product of and up to homotopy. The base pair has a single free homology group in degree , so the Künneth theorem gives the displayed shift without a torsion term. The relative long exact sequence then gives . The connecting map retains the twisting of the original Serre fibration.
For a based Serre fibration with fibre over the basepoint, lift a based cube in from its constant bottom face, keeping the side faces fixed. Its final face lies in , giving surjectivity of the relative map. Homotopies in lift; two lifts of the same cube are relatively homotopic by lifting with both side liftings prescribed. This gives injectivity. For this is a group isomorphism; at it is initially a bijection of pointed sets, unless the relative set is endowed with the group law transported through the fibration.
Splitting of a simply connected Eilenberg–MacLane fibration Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-14
For a Serre fibration with this fiber over a simply connected CW base, the fiber identity class has only one possible nonzero outgoing differential in the cohomological Serre spectral sequence, landing in . If that group vanishes, the class extends to the CW total space. Its representing map, paired with projection to , is an isomorphism on fiber and base homotopy groups and hence a weak homotopy equivalence to the product.