Georgescu, Magdalena Cecilia2013-12-172013-12-1720132013-12-17http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5090Spectral flow, in its simplest incarnation, counts the net number of eigenvalues which change sign as one traverses a path of self-adjoint Fredholm operators in the set of of bounded operators B(H) on a Hilbert space. A generalization of this idea changes the setting to a semifinite von Neumann algebra N and uses the trace τ to measure the amount of spectrum which changes from negative to positive along a path; the operators are still self-adjoint, but the Fredholm requirement is replaced by its von Neumann algebras counterpart, Breuer-Fredholm. Our work is ensconced in this semifinite von Neumann algebra setting. We prove a uniqueness result in the case when N is a factor. In the case when the operators under consideration are bounded perturbations of a fixed unbounded operator with τ-compact resolvents, we give a different proof of a p-summable integral formula which calculates spectral flow, and fill in some of the gaps in the proof that spectral flow can be viewed as an intersection number if N = B(H).enspectral flowsemifinite von Neumann algebraThesisAvailable to the World Wide Web