THE INDEX OF THE SCATTERING OPERATOR ON THE POSITIVE SPECTRAL SUBSPACE

We construct the scattering operator for a spinor field in a time dependent background by the Dyson expansion. Then we show that the restriction of the scattering operator to the positive spectral subspace (with respect to a reference Hamiltonian) is Fredholm. The computation of the index of this restriction is reduced to the index computation for an elliptic pseudodifferential operator of order zero. We obtain the index in terms of a cohomological formula by means of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem.