A Morse complex on manifolds with boundary

Abstract

Given a compact smooth manifold $M$ with non-empty boundary and a Morse function, a pseudo-gradient Morse-Smale vector field adapted to the boundary allows one to build a Morse complex whose homology is isomorphic to the (absolute or relative to the boundary) homology of $M$ with integer coefficients. Our approach simplifies other methods which have been discussed in more specific geometric settings.