Atiyah--Patodi--Singer boundary condition and a splitting formula of a spectral flow (Q2581856)

The paper deals with the problem of additivity of the spectral flow of 1-parameter families of first order elliptic operators and provides some splitting formulas for the spectral flow. In order to put things in context, let us recall some basic facts and formulate the problem. Assume we are given a continuous path \(A_{t}\), \(t\in [ 0,1]\), of elliptic first order self adjoint differential operators acting on sections of a bundle \(E\) over a compact closed manifold \(M\). The operators \(A_{t}\) are well known to have compact resolvents, and the spectral flow of the path of operators is defined as the number of times the eigenvalues of the operators crosses zero. A more rigorous definition (in a much more general setting) was given in [\textit{J. Phillips}, Can. Math. Bull. 39, 460--467 (1996; Zbl 0878.19001)]: Choose a subdivision \(0=t_{0}<t_{0}<\dots<t_{n}=1\) of \([0,1]\) such that there exist \(\varepsilon _{j}>0\), \(j=1,2,\dots,n\) with \(\pm \varepsilon \notin \text{spec}A_{t}\) and \([-\varepsilon ,\varepsilon ]\cap \text{spec}_{ess}A_{t}=\varnothing \) for \(t\in [ t_{j-1},t_{j}]\). Let \(P(X,A_{t})\), \(X\subset R\) be the spectral measure of \(A_{t}\). Then \(Sf(A_{t})=\sum_{j=1}^{n}(\text{rank}(P([0,\varepsilon _{j}),A(t_{j})))-\text{rank}(P([0,\varepsilon _{j}),A(t_{j-1}))))\); it is to be stressed that the definition applies to paths of general Fredholm self adjoint (bounded) operators, not only to paths of differential operators. Now assume a hypersurface \(\Sigma \) cuts the manifold \(M\) into two submanifolds with boundary, say \(M=M_{-}\cup _{\Sigma }M_{+}\). Then various (pairs of) Fredholm operators (e.g., boundary value problems) related to an elliptic first order (self adjoint) operator \(A\) on \(M\) ariser in a natural way using this decomposition. In the paper the author considers the pair Atiyah-Patodi-Singer boundary value problems related to \(A_{\pm }^{\prime }(t)=A(t)\) restricted to \(C_{0}^{\infty }(M_{\pm }),\) which give rise to two Fredholm self adjoint operators \(A_{\pm }^{APS}(t)\) acting on suitable spaces \(D_{\pm }^{APS}(t)\), and the pair of operators \(A_{\pm }(t)\), which are the restrictions of \ \(A_{\pm }^{\prime \ast }(t)\) to \(D_{\pm }(t)=\{f\in H^{1}(M_{\pm }):\exists \widetilde{f}\in H^{1}(M)\) such that \(\widetilde{f}\) extends \(f\) and \(A_{t}(f)=0\) on \(M_{\mp }\}\), under the assumptions that the operators \(A(t)\) are of the product type in a collar neighborhood of \(\Sigma \) and have unique continuation property with respect to \(\Sigma \), that is to say if a solution \(f\) of \(A_{\pm }(f)=0\) vanishes on \(\Sigma \) then it vanishes identically on the whole \(M_{\pm }\) (it is a non-trivial fact that the operators \(A_{\pm }(t)\) are Fredholm and self adjoint). The spectral flow is then well defined for all the paths of operators \(A_{\pm }^{APS}(t)\) and \(A_{\pm }(t)\), and the problem of expressing the spectral flow of \(A(t)\) in terms of the spectral flows of these paths of operators (question of additivity of the spectral flow) arises in a natural way. For the special case of paths of operators of the form \(A_{t}=A+C_{t}\), where \(A\) is a fixed self adjoint first order differential operator and \(C_{t}\) is a path of self adjoint bundle maps, the author proves that \(Sf(A_{t})=Sf(A_{+t})+Sf(A_{-t})\). A similar formula is proved for the paths \(A_{\pm }^{APS}(t)\), however a correction term (roughly Maslov indices of the Cauchy data of the operators \(A_{\pm }(0)\) and \(A_{\pm }(1)\)) must be added.