A cohomological formula for the Atiyah–Patodi–Singer index on manifolds with boundary

Abstract

The main result of this paper is a new Atiyah–Singer type cohomological formula for the index of Fredholm pseudodifferential operators on a manifold with boundary. The nonlocality of the chosen boundary condition prevents us to apply directly the methods used by Atiyah and Singer in [4, 5]. However, by using the K-theory of C*-algebras associated to some groupoids, which generalizes the classical K-theory of spaces, we are able to understand the computation of the APS index using classic algebraic topology methods (K-theory and cohomology). As in the classic case of Atiyah–Singer ([4, 5]), we use an embedding into a Euclidean space to express the index as the integral of a true form on a true space, the integral being over a C∞-manifold called the singular normal bundle associated to the embedding. Our formula is based on a K-theoretical Atiyah–Patodi–Singer theorem for manifolds with boundary that is inspired by Connes' tangent groupoid approach, it is not a groupoid interpretation of the famous Atiyah–Patodi–Singer index theorem.