Sylvain Cappell, Dennis DeTurck, Herman Gluck, Edward Y Miller
Cohomology of harmonic forms on Riemannian manifolds with boundary
On a smooth compact manifold M, the cohomology of the complex of differential forms is isomorphic to the ordinary cohomology by the classical theorem of de Rham. When M has a Riemannian metric g, the harmonic forms constitute a subcomplex of the de Rham complex because the Laplacian commutes with exterior differentiation. When (M, g) has no boundary, all of its harmonic forms are closed, and hence the cohomology of this subcomplex is isomorphic to the ordinary cohomology by the classical theorem of Hodge. But when the boundary of (M, g) is non-empty, it is possible for a p-form to be harmonic without being closed, and some of these, which are exact, although not the exterior derivatives of harmonic p – 1-forms, represent an “echo” of the ordinary p – 1-dimensional cohomology within the p-dimensional harmonic cohomology.
Forum Mathematicum, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0933-7741
Volume: 18, 11/2006
Pages: 923 - 931
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