An Atiyah-Singer theorem for gerbes

Abstract

Let M be a riemannian manifold. The existence of a spin structure on M, enables to study the topology of M. The obstruction to the existence of the spin structure is given by the second Stiefel-Whitney class. This class is the classifying cocycle of a gerbe. One may expect that the study of this gerbe may have topological applications, for example, one may try to generalize the spinors Lichnerowicz theorem in this setting. On this purpose, we must first prove an Atiyah-Singer theorem for gerbes which is the main goal of this paper.