Spectral sections: two proofs of a theorem of Melrose-Piazza

Abstract

Spectral sections of families of self-adjoint Fredholm operators were introduced by Melrose and Piazza for the needs of index theory. The basic result about spectral sections is a theorem of Melrose and Piazza to the effect that a family admits a spectral section if and only if its analytic index vanishes. The present paper is devoted to two proofs of this theorem. These proofs allow to generalize this theorem and to clarify some subtle aspects related to the definition of the analytic index and trivializations of Hilbert bundles. It is based on ideas of author's paper arXiv:2111.15081, but is largely independent from it.