Cobordism invariance of the index for realizations of elliptic operators revisited

Abstract

We revisit an argument due to Lesch (Topology 32 (1993), no. 3, 611-623) for proving the cobordism invariance of the index of Dirac operators on even-dimensional closed manifolds and combine this with recent work by the author (New York J. Math. 28 (2022), 705-772) to show vanishing results for the spectral flow for families of selfadjoint Fredholm realizations of elliptic operators in case the family is induced on the boundary by an elliptic operator on a compact space. This work is motivated by studying the behavior of the index of realizations of elliptic operators under cobordisms of statified manifolds.