Cobordism Invariance of the Index of Callias-Type Operators

Abstract

We introduce a notion of cobordism of Callias-type operators over complete Riemannian manifolds and prove that the index is preserved by such a cobordism. As an application we prove a gluing formula for Callias-type index. In particular, a usual index of an elliptic operator on a compact manifold can be computed as a sum of indexes of Callias-type operators on two non-compact, but topologically simpler manifolds. As another application we give a new proof of the relative index theorem for Callias-type operators, which also leads to a new proof of the Callias index theorem.