Adiabatic limits of eta and zeta functions of elliptic operators (Q1434198)

The paper concerns the adiabatic limits of (normalized) zeta (times \(t\)) and eta functions of elliptic operators built from a family of elliptic operators indexed by the circle \(S^1\), and the main result are certain formulas for said adiabatic limits of zeta and eta functions themselves rather than just for their regularized values at zero. Moreover some formulas for the values at zero of the zeta and eta functions are derived from the above-mentioned more general formulas, and a new proof of the Witten holonomy formula relating the determinant bundle of a family of Dirac operators indexed by the circle \(S^1\) to the adiabatic limit of the eta invariant is given. It is to be stressed that the paper deals with general first order elliptic difierential operators and not just Dirac operators, which is a significant generalization of earlier results of this nature. Another result of the paper is an extension of the Mazzeo-Melrose calculus of adiabatic operators, and this extended calculus is the main technical tool for obtaining the above-mentioned results. Here is a little more detailed presentation of the paper. First the author recalls the Bismut-Freed extension of a family \(D\) of elliptic operators on the smooth fiber bundle \(p:X\to M\) to an elliptic operator \(\delta_t\) on the entire manifold \(X\) (\(t\) is the ``adiabatic'' parameter), and gives a very concise self-contained proof of the fact that both the normalized zeta and eta functions (the ordinary spectral zeta and eta normalized by the factor of \(\Gamma(s/2)\) and \(\pi^{-1}\Gamma((1+s)/2)\) respectively) admit meromorphic extensions to the whole complex plane \(C\) with simple poles at integers. Next a reminder of some basic facts about the determinant bundle and the Bismut-Freed connection on it follows. In the paragraph 6, which is the core of the whole paper, the autbor describes an extension of the Mazzeo-Melrose calculus of adiabatic operators. Finally this extended calculus is applied to prove main results of the paper. An exemplary result is as follows: Assume \(D\) to be an invertible family of elliptic first order difierential operators indexed by \(S^1\). Then the family of eta functions \(\overline\eta(\delta_t,s)\) (a priori defined for \(t > 0)\) extends to a smooth family of meromorphic functions for \(t\in \langle 0, \varepsilon)\), and we have the following formula: \(\lim_{t\to 0}\overline\eta(\delta_t,s) =1/ (i\pi)\int_{S^1}A(D,s)\) (where \(A(D,s)\) is the Bismut-Freed family of 1-forms). From this result the Witten formula for the holonomy of the determinant bundle follows immediately. As mentioned above, analogous results are given for the zeta function of non-invertible families.