A semiclassical heat kernel proof of the Poincaré-Hopf theorem (Q494718)

The connection between semiclassical analysis and Morse theory was discovered by Witten about 30 years ago and got a lot of attention ever since. In this interesting article, the author shows that one can use the semiclassical asymptotics of the heat kernel of Witten's operator to recover the interpolation formula appearing in the Thom form proof. For the index, one obtains a time-dependent integral formula which is evaluated by the method of stationary phase to derive the Poincaré-Hopf theorem. The author shows how this method is related to approaches using the Thom form of Mathai and Quillen. Afterwards, the author uses a more general version of the stationary phase approximation in the case that the perturbing function has critical submanifolds to derive a degenerate version of the Poincaré-Hopf theorem.