CONTACT DEGREE AND THE INDEX OF FOURIER INTEGRAL-OPERATORS

An elliptic Fourier integral operator of order 0, associated to a homo geneous canonical diffeomorphism, on a compact manifold is Fredholm on L-2 The index may be expressed as the sum of a term, which we call th e contact degree, associated to the canonical diffeomorphism and a ter m, computable by the Atiyah-Singer theorem, associated to the symbol. The contact degree is shown to be defined for any oriented-contact dif feomorphism of a contact manifold and is then reduced to the index of a Dirac operator on the mapping torus, also computable by the theorem of Atiyah and Singer. In this case, of an operator on a fixed manifold , these results answer a question of Weinstein in a manner consistent with a more general conjecture of Atiyah.