I will report on new joint work with Leandro Arosio (University of Rome, Tor Vergata). Complex manifolds can be thought of as laid out across a spectrum characterised by rigidity at one end and flexibility at the other. On the rigid side, Kobayashi-hyperbolic manifolds have at most a finite-dimensional group of symmetries. On the flexible side, there are manifolds with an extremely large group of holomorphic automorphisms, the prototypes being the affine spaces $\mathbb C^n$ for $n \geq 2$. From a dynamical point of view, hyperbolicity does not permit chaos. An endomorphism of a Kobayashi-hyperbolic manifold is non-expansive with respect to the Kobayashi distance, so every family of endomorphisms is equicontinuous. We show that not only does flexibility allow chaos: under a strong anti-hyperbolicity assumption, chaotic automorphisms are generic. A special case of our main result is that if $G$ is a connected complex linear algebraic group of dimension at least 2, not semisimple, then chaotic automorphisms are generic among all holomorphic automorphisms of $G$ that preserve a left- or right-invariant Haar form. For $G=\mathbb C^n$, this result was proved (although not explicitly stated) some 20 years ago by Fornaess and Sibony. Our generalisation follows their approach. I will give plenty of context and background, as well as some details of the proof of the main result.

Suppose M is a smooth Riemannian manifold on which a Lie group G acts properly and isometrically. In this talk I will explore properties of a particular class of G-invariant operators on M, called G-Callias-type operators. These are Dirac operators that have been given an additional Z_2-grading and a perturbation so as to be "invertible outside of a cocompact set in M". It turns out that G-Callias-type operators are equivariantly Fredholm and so have an index in the K-theory of the maximal group C*-algebra of G. This index can be expressed as a KK-product of a class in K-homology and a class in the K-theory of the Higson G-corona. In fact, one can show that the K-theory of the Higson G-corona is highly non-trivial, and thus the index theory of G-Callias-type operators is not obviously trivial. As an application of the index theory of G-Callias-type operators, I will mention an obstruction to the existence of G-invariant metrics of positive scalar curvature on M.