Boundary integral for the Ramachandran index (Q396477)

In a series of foundational papers (e. g., [\textit{M. F. Atiyah} et al., Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 77, 43--69 (1975; Zbl 0297.58008)]), Atiyah, Patodi and Singer introduced some boundary condition so that a Dirac operator on a compact manifold with product structure on the boundary is a Fredholm operator and the APS index formula was obtained in computing its Fredholm index. In [\textit{M. Ramachandran}, J. Differ. Geom. 38, No. 2, 315--349 (1993; Zbl 0787.58040)], Ramachandran generalised the Atiyah's \(L^2\)-index for cocompact Galois covering space to the setting of manifolds with boundary and obtained an APS index formula for covering spaces. A result in classical theory shows that the APS index depends only on the index of a Fredhom operator on the boundary (see, for example, [\textit{B. Booss-Bavnbek} and \textit{K. P. Wojciechowski}, in: Clifford algebras and their applications in mathematical physics. Proceedings of the third conference held at Deinze, Belgium, 1993. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 55--66 (1993; Zbl 0836.58041)]). In this paper, the author show that for the case of cocompact Galois covering considered by Ramachandran, the APS index could still be reduced to boundary calculations. Being more precise, let \(X\) be a cocompact Galois cover with deck transformation group \(\Gamma\) and with boundary \(Y\) and let \(D\) be a \(\Gamma\)-invariant Dirac operator. The Atiyah \(L^2\)-index (in the sense of Ramachandran) can be defined by the von Neumann \(\Gamma\)-dimension of the kernel of \(D\) satisfying the APS boundary condition, i.e., sections \(s\in\mathrm{ker} D\) satisfying \(\chi_{[0, \infty)}(Q)(s|_Y)=0\), where \(Q\) is the restriction of \(D\) to the boundary \(Y\). The author showed that the restriction to \(Y\) of sections of \(\mathrm{ker} D\) satisfying the APS boundary condition have the same \(\Gamma\)-dimension. Hence the \(L^2\)-index depends only on the boundary calculation.