Mass endomorphism, surgery and perturbations (Q486762)

The mass endomorphism was introduced in [\textit{B. Ammann et al.,} Commun. Anal. Geom. 14, No. 1, 163--182 (2006; Zbl 1126.53024)]. In the present work, the authors prove that the mass endomorphism associated to the Dirac operator on a compact Riemannian spin manifold is non-zero for generic Riemannian metrics. The proof involves a study of the mass endomorphism under surgery, its behavior near metrics with harmonic spinors, and analytic perturbations arguments.