arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to John Lott.
This is an expository paper about the geometry of the torsion constraints in the superspace formulation of supergravity theories. It was prepared for the 2001 Park City Research Program in Supergeometry.
We give results about the L^2 kernel and the spectrum of the Dirac operator on a complete Riemannian manifold which is conformally equivalent to the interior of a Riemannian manifold with nonempty boundary.
We analyze the limit of the spectrum of a geometric Dirac-type operator under a collapse with bounded diameter and bounded sectional curvature. In the case of a smooth limit space B, we show that the limit of the spectrum is given by the spectrum of a certain first-order differential operator on B, which can be constructed using superconnections. In the case of a general limit space X, we express the limit operator in terms of a transversally elliptic operator on a G-space Y, with X = Y/G. As an application, we give a characterization of manifolds which do not admit uniform upper bounds, in terms of diameter and sectional curvature, on the k-th eigenvalue of the square of a Dirac-type operator. We also give a formula for the essential spectrum of a Dirac-type operator on a finite-volume manifold with pinched negative sectional curvature.
We show that a noncompact manifold with bounded sectional curvature, whose ends are sufficiently Gromov-Hausdorff close to rays, has a finite dimensional space of square-integrable harmonic forms. In the special case of a finite-volume manifold with pinched negative sectional curvature, we show that the essential spectrum of the p-form Laplacian is the union of the essential spectra of a collection of ordinary differential operators associated to the ends. We give examples of such manifolds with curvature pinched arbitrarily close to -1 and with an infinite number of gaps in the spectrum of the function Laplacian.
If M is a compact oriented manifold-with-boundary whose fundamental group is virtually nilpotent or Gromov-hyperbolic, we show that the higher signatures of M are oriented-homotopy invariants.
We define and study the signature, A-hat genus and higher signatures of the quotient space of an $S^1$-action on a closed oriented manifold. We give applications to questions of positive scalar curvature and to an Equivariant Novikov Conjecture.
We show that there are topological obstructions for a noncompact manifold to admit a Riemannian metric with quadratic curvature decay and a volume growth which is slower than that of Euclidean space of the same dimension.
We relate the L^2 cohomology of a complete hyperbolic manifold to the invariant currents on its limit set.
Let L be a lattice in a connected Lie group. We show that besides a few exceptional cases, the deficiency of L is nonpositive.
Let M be a complete Riemannian manifold with a free cocompact Z^k-action. Let k(t,x,y) be the heat kernel on M. We compute the asymptotics of k(t,x,y) in the limit in which t goes to infinity and d(x,y) is comparable to sqrt{t}. We show that in this limit, the heat diffusion is governed by an effective Euclidean metric on R^k coming from the Hodge inner product on H^1(M/Z^k; R).
We give relationships between the vanishing of the A-hat genus and the possibility that a spin manifold can collapse with curvature bounded below.
We define extensions of the $L^2$-analytic invariants of closed manifolds, called delocalized $L^2$-invariants. These delocalized invariants are constructed in terms of a nontrivial conjugacy class of the fundamental group. We show that in many cases, they are topological in nature. We show that the marked length spectrum of an odd-dimensional hyperbolic manifold can be recovered from its delocalized $L^2$-analytic torsion. There are technical convergence questions.
We prove an index theorem concerning the pushforward of flat B-vector bundles, where B is an appropriate algebra. We construct the associated analytic torsion form T. If Z is a smooth closed aspherical manifold, we show that T gives invariants of the homotopy groups of Diff(Z).
This is an expository article on the question of whether zero lies in the spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator acting on differential forms on a manifold.
We give results on the following questions about a topologically tame hyperbolic 3-manifold M : 1. Does M have nonzero square-integrable harmonic 1-forms? 2. Does zero lie in the spectrum of the Laplacian acting on (1-forms on M)/Ker(d)?
We define analytic indices which involve the eta form and the analytic torsion form. We show that these indices are independent of the geometric choices made in their definitions, and hence are topological in nature.
We prove the vanishing of a certain characteristic class of flat vector bundles when the structure groups of the bundles are contained in GL(N,Z). We do so by explicitly writing the characteristic class as an exact form on the base of the bundle.