Members & Former Members

When trying to cast the free fermion in the framework of functorial field theory, its chiral anomaly manifests in the fact that it assigns the determinant of the Dirac operator to a top-dimensional closed spin manifold, which is not a number as expected, but an element of a complex line. In functorial field theory language, this means that the theory is twisted, which gives rise to an anomaly theory. In this paper, we give a detailed construction of this anomaly theory, as a functor that sends manifolds to infinite-dimensional Clifford algebras and bordisms to bimodules.

Related project(s):
5Index theory on Lorentzian manifolds

Let (Mi,gi)i∈N be a sequence of spin manifolds with uniform bounded curvature and diameter that converges to a lower dimensional Riemannian manifold (B,h) in the Gromov-Hausdorff topology. Lott showed that the spectrum converges to the spectrum of a certain first order elliptic differential operator D on B. In this article we give an explicit description of D. We conclude that D is self-adjoint and characterize the special case where D is the Dirac operator on B.

Related project(s):
5Index theory on Lorentzian manifolds

For a closed, connected direct product Riemannian manifold (M,g)=(M1×⋯×Ml,g1⊕⋯⊕gl), we define its multiconformal class [[g]] as the totality {f12g1⊕⋯⊕fl2gl} of all Riemannian metrics obtained from multiplying the metric gi of each factor Mi by a function fi2>0 on the total space M. A multiconformal class [[g]] contains not only all warped product type deformations of g but also the whole conformal class [g~] of every g~∈[[g]]. In this article, we prove that [[g]] carries a metric of positive scalar curvature if and only if the conformal class of some factor (Mi,gi) does, under the technical assumption dimMi≥2. We also show that, even in the case where every factor (Mi,gi) has positive scalar curvature, [[g]] carries a metric of scalar curvature constantly equal to −1 and with arbitrarily large volume, provided l≥2 and dimM≥3. In this case, such negative scalar curvature metrics within [[g]] for l=2 cannot be of any warped product type.

Related project(s):
15Spaces and Moduli Spaces of Riemannian Metrics with Curvature Bounds on compact and non-compact Manifolds

We study the behavior of the spectrum of the Dirac operator together with a symmetric W1,∞-potential on a collapsing sequence of spin manifolds with bounded sectional curvature and diameter losing one dimension in the limit. If there is an induced spin or pin− structure on the limit space N, then there are eigenvalues that converge to the spectrum of a first order differential operator D on N together with a symmetric W1,∞-potential. In the case of an orientable limit space N, D is the spin Dirac operator DN on N if the dimension of the limit space is even and if the dimension of the limit space is odd, then D=DN⊕−DN.

Related project(s):
5Index theory on Lorentzian manifolds

We derive various pinching results for small Dirac eigenvalues using the classification of spinc and spin manifolds admitting nontrivial Killing spinors. For this, we introduce a notion of convergence for spinc manifolds which involves a general study on convergence of Riemannian manifolds with a principal S1-bundle. We also analyze the relation between the regularity of the Riemannian metric and the regularity of the curvature of the associated principal S1-bundle on spinc manifolds with Killing spinors.

Related project(s):
5Index theory on Lorentzian manifolds

 Let M(n,D) be the space of closed n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds (M,g) with diam(M)≤D and |secM|≤1. In this paper we consider sequences (Mi,gi) in M(n,D) converging in the Gromov–Hausdorff topology to a compact metric space Y. We show, on the one hand, that the limit space of this sequence has at most codimension one if there is a positive number r such that the quotient vol(BMir(x))/injMi(x) can be uniformly bounded from below by a positive constant C(n, r, Y) for all points x∈Mi. On the other hand, we show that if the limit space has at most codimension one then for all positive r there is a positive constant C(n, r, Y) bounding the quotient vol(BMir(x))/injMi(x) uniformly from below for all x∈Mi. As a conclusion, we derive a uniform lower bound on the volume and a bound on the essential supremum of the sectional curvature for the closure of the space consisting of all manifolds in M(n,D) with C≤vol(M)/inj(M).

Related project(s):
5Index theory on Lorentzian manifolds