Elliptic Operators and Higher Signatures

A well-known property of the signature of closed oriented 4n-dimensional manifolds is Novikov additivity, which states that if a manifold is split into two manifolds with boundary along an oriented smooth hypersurface, then the signature of the original manifold equals the sum of the signatures of the resulting manifolds with boundary. Wall showed that this property is not true of signatures on manifolds with boundary and that the difference from additivity could be described...

In this paper, we survey recent results on index defects of elliptic operators on manifolds with boundary. Index defects are similar to the Hirzebruch signature defects in topology, where the defects appear as the correction terms to the signature formula on manifolds with boundary. For some natural classes of elliptic operators, the index defects are found and the corresponding topological indices are computed. The theory is illustrated on two examples: operators satisfying ...

The modular operad $H_\ast(\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n})$ of the homology of Deligne-Mumford compactifications of moduli spaces of pointed Riemann surfaces has a minimal model governed by higher homology operations on the open moduli spaces $H_\ast(\mathcal{M}_{g,n})$. Using Getzler's elliptic relation, we give an explicit construction of the first family of such higher operations.

For closed oriented manifolds, we establish oriented homotopy invariance of higher signatures that come from the fundamental group of a large class of orientable 3-manifolds, including the ``piecewise geometric'' ones in the sense of Thurston. In particular, this class, that will be carefully described, is the class of all orientable 3-manifolds if the Thurston Geometrization Conjecture is true. In fact, for this type of groups, we show that the Baum-Connes Conjecture With Co...

We prove that the higher harmonic signature of an even dimensional oriented Riemannian foliation of a compact Riemannian manifold with coefficients in a leafwise U(p,q)-flat complex bundle is a leafwise homotopy invariant. We also prove the leafwise homotopy invariance of the twisted higher Betti classes. Consequences for the Novikov conjecture for foliations and for groups are investigated. Replaces The Higher Harmonic Signature for Foliations I: The Untwisted Case, and co...

If a differential operator $D$ on a smooth Hermitian vector bundle $S$ over a compact manifold $M$ is symmetric, it is essentially self-adjoint and so admits the use of functional calculus. If $D$ is also elliptic, then the Hilbert space of square integrable sections of $S$ with the canonical left $C(M)$-action and the operator $\chi(D)$ for $\chi$ a normalizing function is a Fredholm module, and its $K$-homology class is independent of $\chi$. In this expository article, we ...

This note is a sequel to our earlier paper of the same title [dg-ga/9710001] and describes invariants of rational homology 3-spheres associated to acyclic orthogonal local systems. Our work is in the spirit of the Axelrod-Singer papers, generalizes some of their results, and furnishes a new setting for the purely topological implications of their work.

In this paper we give a survey of elliptic theory for operators associated with diffeomorphisms of smooth manifolds. Such operators appear naturally in analysis, geometry and mathematical physics. We survey classical results as well as results obtained recently. The paper consists of an introduction and three sections. In the introduction we give a general overview of the area of research. For the reader's convenience here we tried to keep special terminology to a minimum. In...

In this paper, we give two Lichnerowicz type formulas for modified Novikov operators. We prove KastlerKalau-Walze type theorems for modified Novikov operators on compact manifolds with (resp.without) boundary. We also compute the spectral action for Witten deformation on 4-dimensional compact manifolds.

It is well known that elliptic operators on a smooth compact manifold are classified by K-homology. We prove that a similar classification is also valid for manifolds with simplest singularities: isolated conical points and fibered boundary. The main ingredients of the proof of these results are: an analog of the Atiyah-Singer difference construction in the noncommutative case and an analog of Poincare isomorphism in K-theory for our singular manifolds. As applications we g...