This is the second post devoted to describing some of the ideas in Atiyah’s paper “Vector fields on manifolds.” Last time, we saw that one could prove the classical vanishing of the Euler characteristic on a manifold admitting a nowhere zero vector field using the symmetries of the de Rham complex. In this post, I’ll describe how analogous methods lead to some of the deeper results in the paper.
1. The case of a field of planes
One of the benefits of Atiyah’s idea of using symmetries of differential operators is that it gives us a host of other results, which are not connected with the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem.
For instance:
Theorem 3 Let
be a compact manifold admitting an oriented two-dimensional subbundle
. Then
is even.
The proof of this result starts off as before. Yesterday, we observed that the Euler characteristic of a Riemannian manifold can be obtained as the index of the elliptic operator
The operator (obtained by “rolling up” the de Rham complex, whose index is precisely
) is a map of the global sections
. As we saw yesterday, the symbol of this operator
is precisely given by left Clifford multiplication. In other words, the symbol of
at a cotangent vector
is precisely given by left Clifford multiplication
by
on
.
The method Atiyah uses to construct symmetries of is to use the simple observation that left and right Clifford multiplication commute. This enables him to construct an operator
commuting with
such that
, thus—approximately—endowing the kernel and cokernel of
with a complex structure.
Proof: Let be a two-dimensional vector subbundle; we identify the tangent and cotangent bundles via a Riemannian metric. We can define a global section of
as follows. If
is a local oriented orthonormal frame for
, then consider the Clifford product
. This is well-defined: it doesn’t depend on the orthonormal frame. Consequently,
is a global section of
.
Observe that the Clifford product is identically
by the anticommutation relations.
Now consider the -graded operator
given by right Clifford multiplication by . Then
. Since the symbol of
is rightClifford multiplication by
, we find that the symbol of
commutes with
.
The idea is to use to obtain a complex structure on the kernel and cokernel of
. However,
itself does not commute with
, only to first order. But instead we can consider
Then has the same symbol as
and honestly commutes with
. Consequently, the kernel and cokernel of
are endowed with complex structures, which gives
However, since and
share the same symbol, we have
2. The signature operator
There are a number of subtler results proved in the paper using the same method: one has a given geometric invariant as an index of an elliptic operator. The symbol of this elliptic operator commutes with right Clifford multiplication. Given the existence of fields of tangent planes (or something like that), one uses right Clifford multiplication to produce an action of a Clifford algebra on the kernel and cokernel of an “averaged” version of this elliptic operator, which still has the symbol. But the dimensions of representations of a Clifford algebras satisfy divisibility relations, and these give divisibility relations on the relevant geometric invariant.
An example is the so-called signature operator, whose index gives the signature. Let be a compact, oriented manifold of dimension
. The signature of
,
, is the signature of the quadratic form on
given by the cup product followed by integration over
. It is a crucial observation that
is actually the index of an elliptic operator constructed out of
.
Let us assume that is endowed with a Riemannian structure, as usual. Then on
-dimensional forms, one has the Hodge star
It has the property that
where is the wedge product metric on
. The integral is even positive if
. It follows in particular that the
-eigenspace for
consists of forms
such that
, while the
-eigenspace for
consists of forms
such that
. Since
on
, we get a complete decomposition of
.
In fact, the action of preserves the harmonic
-dimensional forms
, which form a space isomorphic to
. It follows that we get a decomposition
of the harmonic -forms into positive and negative eigenspaces for
. Moreover,
since the cup square is positive definite on and negative definite on
.
The idea now is to find an elliptic operator whose kernel is precisely and whose cokernel (or whose adjoint’s kernel) is precisely
. In fact, the elliptic operator will precisely be
, but on a different splitting of
. Let
be the volume form, so in the Clifford algebra,
for a local orthonormal frame. Then
has the property that, in the Clifford algebra,
where is the number of times we have to move an
past an
(with
); it is thus the number of pairs
with
. So
Thus the sign is :
.
In particular, the operator of left multiplication by
has the property that
:
is an involution. For our purposes, we need the involution
(which just takes care of a sign). It defines a splitting
into positive and negative eigenspaces for . The operator
anticommutes with
(and thus
); this is because
and the product
is parallel and anticentral (with respect to the Levi-Civita connection).
Consequently, defines an operator
(or, rather, on the space of sections of these bundles). This is analogous to the operator that gave the Euler characteristic, except we have used a different -grading of the Clifford (or exterior) bundle.
In view of the next proposition, we can call the signature operator.
Proposition 4 The index of
is precisely the signature
.
Proof: Since is self-adjoint, the index of
is precisely the difference
In other words, we have to look at the space of all harmonic forms in and the space of harmonic forms in
, and subtract the dimensions. The claim is that we will get precisely
using the previous notation.
A potential problem is that the harmonic forms in include
-forms for
, which must be counted in the index. However, these don’t contribute. If
denotes harmonic
-forms, then
acts on
by switching the two factors (if ). This means that the positive and negative eigenspaces of
on
have equal dimension (they are the graphs of
and
, respectively). It follows that, when computing the index of
, we need only look at
-forms after all.
But, on -forms,
is precisely the Hodge star
. Thus the splitting induced by
on
-dimensional forms is precisely the splitting described earlier, and the index of
can be computed as
. As we have seen, this is
.
3. Divisibility conditions
Finally, I’ll describe the divisibility conditions imposed on the signature of manifolds admitting lots of independent vector fields.
Theorem 5 Let
be a manifold admitting
linearly independent vector fields. Then
is divisible by
, where
is the dimension of an irreducible representation of the Clifford algebra
.
Proof: In fact, we suppose given linearly independent vector fields
on
; we can assume them orthonormal at each point. These define operators
of right Clifford multiplication by
on the Clifford bundle
. Since the
commute with
, we get an induced action of the
on the splitting
induced by .
Moreover, the commute with the symbol of
because, again, left Clifford multiplication commutes with right Clifford multiplication. This suggests that a suitable average of
will be equivariant for the group generated by the
, and this is indeed the case.
In fact, the ‘s satisfy the relations
They thus generate a finite group containing
. The group algebra of
, when quotiented by the relation that the element
is identified with
, is precisely the Clifford algebra
.
The average
is thus a -equivariant operator. We find that
are representations of , and in particular have dimensions divisible by
.
Thus
where, again, we use the fact that have the same symbol.
By the classification of Clifford algebras, the grow in
fairly rapidly. For
, one has
, and by the periodicity thereafter
. Thus, one gets fairly strong divisibility conditions on the signature.
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