The calculus of Duistermaat's triple index

Abstract

In this paper we develop a systematic calculus for the Duistermaat index, a symplectic invariant defined for triples of Lagrangian subspaces. Introduced nearly half a century ago, this index has lately been the subject of renewed attention, due to its central role in eigenvalue interlacing problems on quantum graphs (and more abstractly for self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators). Here we give an axiomatic characterization of the index that leads to elementary proofs of its fundamental properties. We also relate the index to other quantities often appearing in symplectic geometry, such as the Hörmander--Kashiwara--Wall index and the Maslov index. Among other things, this leads to a curious formula for the Morse index of a difference of Hermitian matrices.