Relative spectral invariants of elliptic operators on manifolds

Abstract

We introduce and study new relative spectral invariants of two elliptic partial differential operators of Laplace and Dirac type on compact smooth manifolds without boundary that depend on both the eigenvalues and the eigensections of these operators and contain much more information about geometry. We prove the existence of the homogeneous short time asymptotics of the new invariants with the coefficients of the asymptotic expansion being integrals of some invariants that depend on the symbols of both operators. The first two coefficients of the asymptotic expansion are computed explicitly.