Bernhelm Booss-Bavnbek (EDT) Spectral Geometry of Manifolds with Boundary and Decomposition of Manifolds

Annotation

In recent years, increasingly complex methods have been brought into play in the treatment of geometric and topological problems for partial differential operators on manifolds. This collection of papers, resulting from a Workshop on Spectral Geometry of Manifolds with Boundary and Decomposition of Manifolds, provides a broad picture of these methods with new results. Subjects in the book range from spectral flow calculations and cut-and-paste considerations, via pseudodifferential methods, asymptotic expansions and variational arguments, to singular manifold theories and $K$-theoretic cohomological strategies. They lead to results on determinants, heat kernels, general trace, index and higher signature formulas, low-dimensional topological invariants, as well as on the structure of the manifolds and operators involved. Moreover, the approaches and results are placed in a physics context by two reviews on the applications in quantum field theory, respectively quantum gravity. This book is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in spectral problems in geometry.