Elliptic complexes on manifolds with boundary (Q1725892)

The authors investigate the Fredholm theory of complexes of operators in pseudodifferential operator algebras on manifolds with boundary, i.e., they focus on the Fredholm property of a complex, instead of a single operator. The essential tools that they use are Boutet de Monvel's calculus. More precisely, a boundary condition for a complex is a homomorphism between the given complex and a complex of pseudodifferential operators on the boundary, and it is said to be a {\em Fredholm problem} if the associated mapping cone has finite-dimensional cohomology spaces. It is known that a complex of differential operators does not have the Freholm property in geberal, so a natural question is how one can complement (elliptic) complexes with boundary conditions to obtain a Fredholm problem. In order to answer this question, the authors develop a Fredholm theory for complexes of operators in algebras of generalized pseudodifferential operators of Toeplitz type. In contrast with the spectral boundary conditions of Atiyah, Patodi, and Singer for a single operator, they show that elliptic complexes of (pseudo) differential operators on smooth compact manifolds with boundary can always be complemented to a Fredholm problem by boundary conditions involving global pseudodifferential projections on the boundary. Moreover, they prove that boundary conditions without projections can be chosen if, and only if, the topological Atiyah-Bott obstruction vanishes. In particular, if Atiyah-Bott obstruction vanishes, they construct complementing boundary conditions explicitly. There are several applications of their main results. For instance, the authors show that the Dolbeault complex on a complex manifold with boundary violates the Atiyah-Bott obstruction in general. By their result, the Dolbeault complex can be complemented by generalized Atiyah-Patodi-Singer conditions to a Fredholm problem.