Witten spinors on nonspin manifolds

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Anda Degeratu, Albert-Ludwig Universitaet Feiburg
Fine Hall 314

Unlike a 3-dimensional manifold, a higher dimensional manifold need not be spin. On an oriented Riemannian manifold the obstruction to having a spin structure is given by the second Stiefel-Whitney class. I will show that even when this obstruction does not vanish, it is still possible to define a notion of singular spin structure and associated singular Dirac operator. Then, modeling on Witten's proof of the Positive Mass Theorem, I will define the notion of Witten spinor on an asymptotically flat nonspin manifold, show their existence and describe their properties.