Fredholm realizations of elliptic symbols on manifolds with boundary II: fibered boundary

We consider two calculi of pseudodifferential operators on manifolds with fibered boundary: Mazzeo's edge calculus, which has as local model the operators associated to products of closed manifolds with asymptotically hyperbolic spaces, and the phi calculus of Mazzeo and the second author, which is similarly modeled on products of closed manifolds with asymptotically Euclidean spaces. We construct an adiabatic calculus of operators interpolating between them, and use this to compute the `smooth' K-theory groups of the edge calculus, determine the existence of Fredholm quantizations of elliptic symbols, and establish a families index theorem in K-theory

Boundary behaviour of Weil-Petersson and fiber metrics for Riemann moduli spaces

The Weil-Petersson and Takhtajan-Zograf metrics on the Riemann moduli spaces of complex structures for an $n$-fold punctured oriented surface of genus $g,$ in the stable range $g+2n>2,$ are shown here to have complete asymptotic expansions in terms of Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates at the exceptional divisors of the Knudsen-Deligne-Mumford compactification. This is accomplished by finding a full expansion for the hyperbolic metrics on the fibers of the universal curve as they approach the complete metrics on the nodal curves above the exceptional divisors and then using a push-forward theorem for conormal densities. This refines a two-term expansion due to Obitsu-Wolpert for the conformal factor relative to the model plumbing metric which in turn refined the bound obtained by Masur. A similar expansion for the Ricci metric is also obtained

Generalized backscattering and the Lax-Phillips transform

Using the free-space translation representation (modified Radon transform) of Lax and Phillips in odd dimensions, it is shown that the generalized backscattering transform (so outgoing angle $\omega =S\theta$ in terms of the incoming angle with $S$ orthogonal and \Id-S invertible) may be further restricted to give an entire, globally Fredholm, operator on appropriate Sobolev spaces of potentials with compact support. As a corollary we show that the modified backscattering map is a local isomorphism near elements of a generic set of potentials.Comment: Minor changes, typos corrected, references adde

Loop-fusion cohomology and transgression

`Loop-fusion cohomology' is defined on the continuous loop space of a manifold in terms of \vCech cochains satisfying two multiplicative conditions with respect to the fusion and figure-of-eight products on loops. The main result is that these cohomology groups, with coefficients in an abelian group, are isomorphic to those of the manifold and the transgression homomorphism factors through the isomorphism.Comment: 10 pages. v2 contains minor correction

Families Index for Pseudodifferential Operators on Manifolds with Boundary

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.Comment: 21 pages; corrected typos, changed the abstract, added a paragraph in the introductio