The first-order spectral flow of the odd signature operator on a manifold with boundary (Q5948943)

The authors compute the spectral flow for paths of signature operators associated to analytic paths of flat connections on an odd-dimensional manifold with boundary. Actually they use the fact of analytic perturbation theory that an analytic path of some selfadjoint operators has analytically varying eigenvalues to study the changes of the spectrum of these operators. Also they provide a topological method based on cup product to compute the ``first order'' of the spectral flow. These results generalize those by the same authors published in [J. Differ. Geom. 40, 505-562 (1994; Zbl 0816.58038)].