Relative cohomology on manifolds with boundary

161 Views Asked by At

I'm studying this paper "Cohomology of Harmonic Forms on Riemannian Manifolds With Boundary".

At the bottom of page 4, it says "$CcC^p_N$ is the orthogonal complement of the exact $p$-forms within the closed ones, so $CcC^p_N \cong H^p(M;\mathbb{R})$". This is straightforward by the definition of cohomology.

Then it says "$CcC^p_D$ is the orthogonal complement of the co-exact $p$-forms within the co-closed ones, so $CcC^p_D \cong H^p(M, \partial M;\mathbb{R})$". My understanding is that the co-closed $p$-forms modulo the co-exact $p$-forms gives $H^p(M;\mathbb{R})$, which is isomorphic to $H^p(M, \partial M;\mathbb{R})$ by the Poincaré–Lefschetz duality, so we have $CcC^p_D \cong H^p(M, \partial M;\mathbb{R})$.

Is my understanding correct? If so, why not just saying $CcC^p_D \cong H^p(M;\mathbb{R})$? In other words, what's the point of bringing up the relative cohomology $H^p(M, \partial M;\mathbb{R})$?