Elliptic Operators and Higher Signatures

We give a proof of the cobordism invariance of the index of elliptic pseudodifferential operators on sigma-compact manifolds, where, in the non-compact case, the operators are assumed to be multiplication outside a compact set. We show that, if the principal symbol class of such an elliptic operator on the boundary of a manifold X has a suitable extension to K^1(TX), then its index is zero. This condition is incorporated into the definition of a cobordism group for non-compac...

We study the spectral geometry of the Riemann curvature tensor for Pseudo-Riemannian manifolds and provide some examples illustrating the phenomena which can arise in the higher signature setting. Dedication: This paper is dedicated to the memory of our colleague Prof.G. Tsagas who studied the spectral geometry of Laplacian.

Higher index of signature operator is a far reaching generalization of signature of a closed oriented manifold. When two closed oriented manifolds are homotopy equivalent, one can define a secondary invariant of the relative signature operator called higher rho invariant. The higher rho invariant detects the topological nonrigidity of a manifold. In this paper, we prove product formulas for higher index and higher rho invariant of signature operator on fibered manifolds. Our ...

We give the homotopy classification and compute the index of boundary value problems for elliptic equations. The classical case of operators that satisfy the Atiyah-Bott condition is studied first. We also consider the general case of boundary value problems for operators that do not necessarily satisfy the Atiyah-Bott condition.

In this paper we prove the existence of a natural mapping from the surgery exact sequence for topological manifolds to the analytic surgery exact sequence of N. Higson and J. Roe. This generalizes the fundamental result of Higson and Roe, but in the treatment given by Piazza and Schick, from smooth manifolds to topological manifolds. Crucial to our treatment is the Lipschitz signature operator of Teleman. We also give a generalization to the equivariant setting of the pro...

We give manifolds in both the Riemannian and in the higher signature settings whose Riemann curvature operators commute, i.e. which satisfy R(a,b)R(c,d)=R(c,d)R(a,b) for all tangent vectors. These manifolds have global geometric phenomena which are quite different for higher signature manifolds than they are for Riemannian manifolds. Our focus is on global properties; questions of geodesic completeness and the behaviour of the exponential map are investigated.

We develop a categorical index calculus for elliptic symbol families. The categorified index problems we consider are a secondary version of the traditional problem of expressing the index class in K-theory in terms of differential-topological data. They include orientation problems for moduli spaces as well as similar problems for skew-adjoint and self-adjoint operators. The main result of this paper is an excision principle which allows the comparison of categorified index ...

We introduce an analogue of the Novikov Conjecture on higher signatures in the context of the algebraic geometry of (nonsingular) complex projective varieties. This conjecture asserts that certain "higher Todd genera" are birational invariants. This implies birational invariance of certain extra combinations of Chern classes (beyond just the classical Todd genus) in the case of varieties with large fundamental group (in the topological sense). We prove the conjecture under th...

The equivariant coarse Novikov conjecture provides an algorithm for determining nonvanishing of equivariant higher index of elliptic differential operators on noncompact manifolds. In this article, we prove the equivariant coarse Novikov conjecture under certain coarse embeddability conditions. More precisely, if a discrete group $\Gamma$ acts on a bounded geometric space $X$ properly, isometrically, and with bounded distortion, $X/\Gamma$ and $\Gamma$ admit coarse embeddings...

In this paper, we adapt part of Weinberger, Xie and Yu's breakthrough work, to define additive higher rho invariant for topological structure group by differential geometric version of signature operators, or in other words, unbounded Hilbert-Poincar\'{e} complexes.