Twistor spaces and spinors over loop spaces (Q2384728)

Witten's work on the genus of the Dirac-Ramond operator on loop spaces had a deep impact in differential geometry and homotopy theory. Ever since the search for a rigourous theory of Dirac operators and their index theory for loop spaces has been of first importance, this paper is a step towards this direction. The authors choose to extend the twistorial reinterpretation of the ordinary finite dimensional Dirac operator to loop spaces of Riemannian spin manifolds, this approach goes far beyond the flat case and is very promising. They introduce two twistor spaces and prove their equivalence in the Kählerian case. The first one comes from the looping of the frame bundle and the second from the Atiyah operator family for loop spaces induced by the Levi-Civita connection. Theis construction relies on the Fourier mode decomposition of the Hilbert space \(L^2(S^1,\mathbb C^d)\). Twistor spaces, being closely related to spin structures in the finite dimensional case, are closely related to the Dixmier-Douay class in the case of loop spaces which is an obstruction to the existence of a string structure. The authors study this class in their framework.