published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Physics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-110). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brigham Young Dept. of Mathematics, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-90).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Economics and Political Science, London. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

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School of Economics and Political Science, Diss.--London, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [143] - 145. The work originates from the author's PhD thesis at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Preface).

We study several unbounded operators with view to extending von Neumann's theory of deficiency indices for single Hermitian operators with dense domain in Hilbert space. If the operators are non-commuting, the problems are difficult, but special cases may be understood with the use representation theory. We will further study the partial derivative operators in the coordinate directions on the L2 space on various covering surfaces of the punctured plane. The operators are defined on the common dense domain of C∞ functions with compact support, and they separately are essentially selfadjoint, but the unique selfadjoint extensions will be non-commuting. This problem is of a geometric flavor, and we study an index formulation for its solution. The applications include the study of vector fields, the theory of Dirichlet problems for second order partial differential operators (PDOs), Sturm-Liouville problems, H.Weyl's limit-point/limit-circle theory, Schrödinger equations, and more.

We prove a general theorem on the local property of the relative index for a wide class of Fredholm operators, including relative index theorems for elliptic operators due to Gromov-Lawson, Anghel, Teleman, Booß-Bavnbek-Wojciechowski, et al. as special cases. In conjunction with additional conditions (like symmetry conditions) this theorem permits one to compute the analytical index of a given operator. In particular, we obtain new index formulas for elliptic pseudodifferential operators and quantized canonical transformations on manifolds with conical singularities as well as for elliptic boundary value problems with a symmetry condition for the conormal symbol.

We give the homotopy classification and compute the index of boundary value problems for elliptic equations. The classical case of operators that satisfy the Atiyah-Bott condition is studied first. We also consider the general case of boundary value problems for operators that do not necessarily satisfy the Atiyah-Bott condition.