Spectral asymptotics for coupled Dirac operators

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the problem of asymptotic spectral flow for a family of coupled Dirac operators. We prove that the leading order term in the spectral flow on an n dimensional manifold is of order r n+1/2 followed by a remainder of O(r n/2). We perform computations of spectral flow on the sphere which show that O(r n-1/2) is the best possible estimate on the remainder. To obtain the sharp remainder we study a semiclassical Dirac operator and show that its odd functional trace exhibits cancellations in its first n+3/2 terms. A normal form result for this Dirac operator and a bound on its counting function are also obtained.