Hearing the shape of inequivalent spin structures and exotic Dirac operators

Abstract

Exotic spinor fields arise from inequivalent spin structures on non-trivial topological manifolds, $M$. This induces an additional term in the Dirac operator, defined by the cohomology group $H^1(M,{\mathbb{Z}}_2)$ that rules a Cech cohomology class. This formalism is extended for manifolds of any finite dimension, endowed with a metric of arbitrary signature. The exotic corrections to heat kernel coefficients, relating spectral properties of exotic Dirac operators to the geometric invariants of $M$, are derived and scrutinized.

30 pages