The KO-valued spectral flow for skew-adjoint Fredholm operators

In this article we give a comprehensive treatment of a `Clifford module flow' along paths in the skew-adjoint Fredholm operators on a real Hilbert space that takes values in KO${}_{*}(\mathbb{R})$ via the Clifford index of Atiyah-Bott-Shapiro. We develop its properties for both bounded and unbounded skew-adjoint operators including an axiomatic characterization. Our constructions and approach are motivated by the principle that $$\text{spectral flow} = \text{Fredholm index}.$$ That is, we show how the KO--valued spectral flow relates to a KO-valued index by proving a Robbin-Salamon type result. The Kasparov product is also used to establish a spectral flow $=$ Fredholm index result at the level of bivariant K-theory. We explain how our results incorporate previous applications of $\mathbb{Z}/ 2\mathbb{Z}$-valued spectral flow in the study of topological phases of matter.