The Universal gerbe and local family index theory

Jul, 2004
26 pages
e-Print:

Citations per year

200420052006231
Abstract:
The goal of this paper is to apply the universal gerbe developed in \cite{CMi1} and \cite{CMi2} and the local family index theorems to give a unified viewpoint on the known examples of geometrically interesting gerbes, including the determinant bundle gerbes in \cite{CMMi1}, the index gerbe in \cite{L} for a family of Dirac operators on odd dimensional closed manifolds. We also discuss the associated gerbes for a family of Dirac operators on odd dimensional manifolds with boundary, and for a pair of Melrose-Piazza's Cl(1)Cl(1)-spectral sections for a family of Dirac operators on even dimensional closed manifolds with vanishing index in KK-theory. The common feature of these bundle gerbes is that there exists a canonical bundle gerbe connection whose curving is given by the degree 2 part of the even eta-form (up to an exact form) arising from the local family index theorem.