Dirac operators on manifolds with periodic ends

Abstract

This paper studies Dirac operators on end-periodic spin manifolds of dimension at least 4. We provide a sufficient condition for such an operator to be Fredholm for a generic end-periodic metric; this condition is shown to be necessary in dimension 4. We make use of end-periodic Dirac operators to give an analytical interpretation of an invariant of non-orientable smooth 4-manifolds due to Cappell and Shaneson. From this interpretation we show that some exotic non-orientable 4-manifolds do not admit a metric of positive scalar curvature.