This week, Thursday at 11:00, U. Haifa Topology & Geometry seminar on November 7, 2019

Geometry & Topology Seminar

Speaker: Marina Prokhorova (Technion)

Topic: Family index for self-adjoint elliptic boundary value problems

Place:    Room 614 in the Science & Education Building

Time:   11:00

Date:  Thursday, November 7, 2019

                                                   Abstract:

An index theory for elliptic operators on a closed manifold was developed by Atiyah and Singer. For a family of such operators parametrized by points of a compact space X, they computed the K^0(X)-valued analytical index in purely topological terms. An analog of this theory for self-adjoint elliptic operators on closed manifolds was developed by Atiyah, Patodi, and Singer; the analytical index of a family in this case takes values in the K^1 group of a base space.

If a manifold has non-empty boundary, then boundary conditions come into play, and situation becomes much more complicated. The integer-valued index of a single boundary value problem was computed by Boutet de Monvel. This result was recently generalized to K^0-valued family index by Melo, Schrohe, and Schick. The case of self-adjoint operators, however, remained open; it seems that Boutet de Monvel’s calculus is not adapted to it.

In the talk I present a family index theorem for self-adjoint elliptic operators on a surface with boundary. I compute the K^1(X)-valued analytical index in terms of the topological data of the family over the boundary. The talk is based on my preprint arXiv:1809.04353.

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