The Aharonov-Bohm effect for massless Dirac fermions and the spectral flow of Dirac-type operators with classical boundary conditions

Abstract

In topological terms, we compute the spectral flow of an arbitrary family of self-adjoint Dirac-type operators with classical (local) boundary conditions on a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary under the assumption that the initial and terminal operators of the family are conjugate by an automorphism of the bundle in which the operators act. We use this result to study conditions for the existence of a nonzero spectral flow of a family of self-adjoint Dirac-type operators with local boundary conditions in a two-dimensional domain with a nontrivial topology and discuss possible physical realizations of a nonzero spectral flow.