Cusp geometry and the cobordism invariance of the index (Q557596)

An important step in the first proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem was the proof that the indices of twisted signature operators are cobordism invariants. Over the last forty years new perspectives on index theory have led to new proofs of the cobordism invariance of indices of classes of (pseudo)differential operators. For elliptic differential operators of order one, the paper under review proves the cobordism invariance of the index by methods based on the approach to pseudodifferential operators described, e.g., in [\textit{R. B. Melrose}, Proc. Int. Congr. Math., Kyoto, Japan, 1990, Vol. I, 217--234 (1991; Zbl 0743.58033)]. More specifically the paper relies on [\textit{R. Lauter} and \textit{S. Moroianu}, Ann. Global Anal. Geom. 21, 31--49 (2002; Zbl 1001.58015)], which gives the index of a fully elliptic cusp operator in terms of the Laurent coefficient of a regularized trace function. This approach allows the author to go beyond cobordism invariance to prove, under appropriate conditions, the vanishing of the sum of the indices of fully elliptic order-one cusp differential operators on the codimension-one boundary faces of a compact manifold with corners. The conditions, which govern the sense in which the boundary operators are restrictions of an operator on the manifold with corners, ensure the canceling of the contributions of higher codimension faces to the index formula.