Families Index for Pseudodifferential Operators on Manifolds with Boundary

Richard Melrose, Frederic Rochon

Published 2003-04-20, updated 2003-11-20Version 3

An analytic index is defined for a family of cusp pseudodifferential operators, $P_b,$ on a fibration with fibres which are compact manifolds with boundaries, provided the family is elliptic and has invertible indicial family at the boundary. In fact there is always a perturbation $Q_b$ by a family of cusp operators of order $-\infty$ such that each $P_b+Q_b$ is invertible. Thus any elliptic family of symbols has a realization as an invertible family of cusp pseudodifferential operators, which is a form of the cobordism invariance of the index. A crucial role is played by the weak contractibility of the group of cusp smoothing operators on a compact manifold with non-trivial boundary and the associated exact sequence of classifying spaces of odd and even K-theory.