The Witten index and the spectral shift function
Publication Name
Reviews in Mathematical Physics
Abstract
In [Spectral asymmetry and Riemannian geometry. III, Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 79 (1976) 71-99] Atiyah, Patodi and Singer introduced spectral flow for elliptic operators on odd-dimensional compact manifolds. They argued that it could be computed from the Fredholm index of an elliptic operator on a manifold of one higher dimension. A general proof of this fact was produced by Robbin-Salamon [The spectral flow and the Maslov index, Bull. London Math. Soc. 27(1) (1995) 1-33, MR 1331677]. In [F. Gesztesy, Y. Latushkin, K. Makarov, F. Sukochev and Y. Tomilov, The index formula and the spectral shift function for relatively trace class perturbations, Adv. Math. 227(1) (2011) 319-420, MR 2782197], a start was made on extending these ideas to operators with some essential spectrum as occurs on non-compact manifolds. The new ingredient introduced there was to exploit scattering theory following the fundamental paper [A. Pushnitski, The spectral flow, the Fredholm index, and the spectral shift function, in Spectral Theory of Differential Operators, American Mathematical Society Translations: Series 2, Vol. 225 (American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2008), pp. 141-155, MR 2509781]. These results do not apply to differential operators directly, only to pseudo-differential operators on manifolds, due to the restrictive assumption that spectral flow is considered between an operator and its perturbation by a relatively trace-class operator. In this paper, we extend the main results of these earlier papers to spectral flow between an operator and a perturbation satisfying a higher pth Schatten class condition for 0 ≤ p < ∞, thus allowing differential operators on manifolds of any dimension d < p + 1. In fact our main result does not assume any ellipticity or Fredholm properties at all and proves an operator theoretic trace formula motivated by [M.-T. Benameur, A. Carey, J. Phillips, A. Rennie, F. Sukochev and K. Wojciechowski, An analytic approach to spectral flow in von Neumann algebras, in Analysis, Geometry and Topology of Elliptic Operators (World Scientific Publisher, Hackensack, NJ, 2006), pp. 297-352, MR 2246773; A. Carey, H. Grosse and J. Kaad, On a spectral flow formula for the homological index, Adv. Math. 289 (2016) 1106-1156, MR 3439708]. We illustrate our results using Dirac type operators on L2(d) for arbitrary d (see Sec. 8). In this setting Theorem 6.4 substantially extends Theorem 3.5 of [A. Carey, F. Gesztesy, H. Grosse, G. Levitina, D. Potapov, F. Sukochev and D. Zanin, Trace formulas for a class of non-Fredholm operators: A review, Rev. Math. Phys. 28(10) (2016) 1630002, MR 3572626], where the case d = 1 was treated.
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