Jean-Michel Bismut

This monograph addresses two significant related questions in complex geometry: the construction of a Chern character on the Grothendieck group of coherent sheaves of a compact complex manifold with values in its Bott-Chern cohomology, and the proof of a corresponding Riemann-Roch-Grothendieck theorem.

This monograph addresses two significant related questions in complex geometry: the construction of a Chern character on the Grothendieck group of coherent sheaves of a compact complex manifold with values in its Bott-Chern cohomology, and the proof of a corresponding Riemann-Roch-Grothendieck theorem. One main tool used is the equivalence of categories established by Block between the derived category of bounded complexes with coherent cohomology and the homotopy category of antiholomorphic superconnections. Chern-Weil theoretic techniques are then used to construct forms that represent the Chern character. The main theorem is then established using methods of analysis, by combining local index theory with the hypoelliptic Laplacian.Coherent Sheaves, Superconnections, and Riemann-Roch-Grothendieck is an important contribution to both the geometric and analytic study of complex manifolds and, as such, it will be a valuable resource formany researchers in geometry, analysis, and mathematical physics.

This book contains all of Wolfgang Doeblin's publications. In addition, it includes a reproduction of the pli cacheté on l'équation de Kolmogoroff and previously unpublished material that Doeblin wrote in 1940. The articles are accompanied by commentaries written by specialists in Doeblin's various areas of interest. The modern theory of probability developed between the two World Wars thanks to the very remarkable work of Kolmogorov, Khinchin, S.N. Bernstein, Romanovsky, von Mises, Hostinsky, Onicescu, Fréchet, Lévy and others, among whom one name shines particularly brightly, that of Wolfgang Doeblin (1915–1940). The work of this young mathematician, whose life was tragically cut short by the war, remains even now, and indeed will remain into the future, an exemplar of originality and of mathematical power. This book was conceived and in essence brought to fruition by Marc Yor before his death in 2014. It is dedicated to him.

This book uses the hypoelliptic Laplacian to evaluate semisimple orbital integrals in a formalism that unifies index theory and the trace formula. The hypoelliptic Laplacian is a family of operators that is supposed to interpolate between the ordinary Laplacian and the geodesic flow. It is essentially the weighted sum of a harmonic oscillator along the fiber of the tangent bundle, and of the generator of the geodesic flow. In this book, semisimple orbital integrals associated with the heat kernel of the Casimir operator are shown to be invariant under a suitable hypoelliptic deformation, which is constructed using the Dirac operator of Kostant. Their explicit evaluation is obtained by localization on geodesics in the symmetric space, in a formula closely related to the Atiyah-Bott fixed point formulas. Orbital integrals associated with the wave kernel are also computed. Estimates on the hypoelliptic heat kernel play a key role in the proofs, and are obtained by combining analytic, geometric, and probabilistic techniques. Analytic techniques emphasize the wavelike aspects of the hypoelliptic heat kernel, while geometrical considerations are needed to obtain proper control of the hypoelliptic heat kernel, especially in the localization process near the geodesics. Probabilistic techniques are especially relevant, because underlying the hypoelliptic deformation is a deformation of dynamical systems on the symmetric space, which interpolates between Brownian motion and the geodesic flow. The Malliavin calculus is used at critical stages of the proof.

This book presents the analytic foundations to the theory of the hypoelliptic Laplacian. The hypoelliptic Laplacian, a second-order operator acting on the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold, is supposed to interpolate between the classical Laplacian and the geodesic flow. Jean-Michel Bismut and Gilles Lebeau establish the basic functional analytic properties of this operator, which is also studied from the perspective of local index theory and analytic torsion. The book shows that the hypoelliptic Laplacian provides a geometric version of the Fokker-Planck equations. The authors give the proper functional analytic setting in order to study this operator and develop a pseudodifferential calculus, which provides estimates on the hypoelliptic Laplacian's resolvent. When the deformation parameter tends to zero, the hypoelliptic Laplacian converges to the standard Hodge Laplacian of the base by a collapsing argument in which the fibers of the cotangent bundle collapse to a point. For the local index theory, small time asymptotics for the supertrace of the associated heat kernel are obtained. The Ray-Singer analytic torsion of the hypoelliptic Laplacian as well as the associated Ray-Singer metrics on the determinant of the cohomology are studied in an equivariant setting, resulting in a key comparison formula between the elliptic and hypoelliptic analytic torsions.