The index of weighted singular integral operators with shifts and slowly oscillating data (Q511272)

In a series of a papers, starting with [\textit{A. Yu. Karlovich} et al., Integral Equations Oper. Theory 70, No. 4, 451--483 (2011; Zbl 1236.47010)], the authors have been conducting an extensive study of the Fredholm properties of a class of singular integral operators acting on \(L^{p}(\mathbb{R}_{+})\) of the form \[ N = (aI-bU_{\alpha})P_{+}^{\gamma}+(cI-dU_{\beta})P_{-}^{\gamma}, \] where \(a,b,c,d\) are slowly oscillating functions, \(U_{\alpha}, U_{\beta}\) are multiplication/composition operators associated with slowly oscillating shifts, and \(P_{\pm} ^{\gamma} = \frac{1}{2}(I \pm S_{\gamma})\) for the weighted Cauchy transform defined by \[ S_{\gamma}f:t\mapsto \frac{1}{i\pi} \int \limits _{0} ^{\infty} \left(\frac{t}{s}\right)^{\gamma}\frac{f(s)}{s-t}\,ds, \] for \(\gamma\in \mathbb{C}\) such that \(0<\frac{1}{p}+\Re(\gamma)<1\). These singular integral operators have a long history (see, e.g., the book [\textit{A. Böttcher} and \textit{Y. I. Karlovich}, Carleson curves, Muckenhoupt weights, and Toeplitz operators. Basel: Birkhäuser (1997; Zbl 0889.47001)] for motivation). Studying them under limited regularity assumptions (on \(a,b,c,d,\alpha,\beta\)) is natural, and part of the current trend of extending harmonic analysis to rough settings. It is also interesting because the spectral theory of these SIO with discontinuous coefficients turns out to be particularly rich and varied. The novelty in this paper is that the authors can now treat \(\alpha \neq \beta\) and \(\gamma \neq 0\), and, perhaps more importantly, can precisely compute the index of \(N\) (see the nicely explicit formula in Theorem 1.4.). To do so, they show that the index of \(N\) has to be equal to the index of a Mellin-pseudodifferential operator \(op(h)\) (Corollary 3.4 of Theorem 3.3) with symbol \(h\) given explicitly in terms of the data. For this type of pseudodifferential operators defined by \[ op(h)f:t\mapsto \frac{1}{2\pi}\int \limits _{\mathbb{R}} \int \limits _{0} ^{\infty} h(t,x) \left(\frac{t}{s}\right)^{ix}f(s)\,\frac{ds}{s}\,dx, \] an index formula (Theorem 2.9) proven in [\textit{A. Yu. Karlovich} et al., Oper. Matrices 8, No. 4, 935--955 (2014; Zbl 1312.45014)] can then be used.