An obstruction to the positivity of relative Yamabe invariants

For a supergroup , we describe an obstruction to the existence of positive scalar curvature metrics with minimal boundary condition on a compact n-dimensional -manifold W with nonempty boundary M, , in terms of the bordism class [M] in the Stolz obstruction group associated to [St2]. In par ticular, when W is a 5-dimensional spin manifold and the -invariant of a connected component of M is nonzero, we prove that W does not admit a positive scalar curvature metric with minimal boundary condition. Received: 4 July 2001; in final form: 5 February 2002 / Published online: 8 November 2002 RID="*" ID="*" Partially supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, No. 11640070.