On the Voevodsky Motive of the Moduli Stack of Vector Bundles on a Curve

We define and study the motive of the moduli stack of vector bundles of fixed rank and degree over a smooth projective curve in Voevodsky’s category of motives. We prove that this motive can be written as a homotopy colimit of motives of smooth projective Quot schemes of torsion quotients of sums of line bundles on the curve. When working with rational coefficients, we prove that the motive of the stack of bundles lies in the localizing tensor subcategory generated by the motive of the curve, using Białynicki-Birula decompositions of these Quot schemes. We conjecture a formula for the motive of this stack, inspired by the work of Atiyah and Bott on the topology of the classifying space of the gauge group, and we prove this conjecture modulo a conjecture on the intersection theory of the Quot schemes.