Witten genus and elliptic genera for proper actions (Q2071798)

The elliptic genera on closed manifolds constructed by Landweber-Stong and Ochanine in a topological way turn out to be the indices of some elliptic operators. Motivated by physics, Witten conjectured that these elliptic operators should be rigid. The Witten conjecture was first proved by Taubes and Bott-Taubes. Using the modular invariance property, Liu presented a simple and unified proof of the Witten conjecture. In this nice paper, the authors construct for the first time the Witten genus and elliptic genera on noncompact manifolds with a proper cocompact action by an almost connected Lie group, and prove vanishing and rigidity results that generalised known results for compact group actions on compact manifolds. The authors also compute this noncompact elliptic genera for some interesting examples.