Reflection Symmetry, APS Boundary Conditions, and Equivariant Spectral Flow on a Warped Cylinder

Abstract

We study reflection symmetry and Atiyah-Patodi-Singer (APS) boundary conditions for twisted Dirac operators on a finite warped cylinder. For a complex line twist with holonomy parameter $A$, we show that the reflection lifts to a unitary symmetry of the twisted Dirac setting if and only if $2A\in \mathbb{Z}$. In the resulting reflection-compatible fixed-holonomy case, reflection pairs opposite shifted angular modes, and the paired APS blocks are unitarily equivalent. The reflection trace on the APS harmonic space localizes to the unique self-paired zero-mode sector. We then turn to parameter-dependent versions of the model. For fixed gauge-trivial holonomy, the family remains pointwise \(O(2)\)-equivariant, and its spectral flow admits an \(RO(O(2))\)-valued decomposition. For genuinely varying holonomy, pointwise \(O(2)\)-equivariance is lost along the path. The representation-ring-valued invariant is then replaced by a residual sign-level invariant: the mod-two parity of the APS crossing events.

36 pages, 1 figure