We describe a construction of fibrewise inner products on the cotangent bundle of the smooth free loop space of a Riemannian manifold. Using this inner product, we construct an operator over the loop space of a string manifold which is directly analogous to the Dirac operator of a spin

We prove some sharp Hardy type inequalities related to the Dirac operator by elementary, direct methods. Some of these inequalities have been obtained previously using spectral information about the Dirac-Coulomb operator. Our results are stated under optimal conditions on the asymptotics of the potentials near zero and near infinity.

Using the Arthur-Selberg trace formula we express the index of a Dirac operator on an arithmetic quotient manifold as the integral over the index form plus a sum of orbital integrals. For the Euler operator these orbital integrals are shown to vanish for products of certain rank one spaces. In this case the index theorem looks exactly as in the compact case.

We study the moduli space of instantons on a simply connected positive definite four manifold by analyzing the classifying map of the index bundle of a family of Dirac operators parametrized by the moduli space. As applications we compute the cohomology ring for the charge 2 moduli space in the rank stable limit.