The Ahlfors Laplacian on a Riemannian manifold with boundary (Q1916873)

The authors study the Ahlfors Laplacian \(L\) on a Riemannian manifold with smooth non-empty boundary; this operator appears in many natural geometrical contexts and is a formally self-adjoint nonnegative differential operator acting on the space of smooth 1-forms. It is a non-minimal operator; the leading symbol of \(L\) is not scalar; this complicates the analysis considerably. The authors derive the Green's formula for the operator, describe several natural elliptic boundary value problems, study the heat kernel for \(L\), and determine the first two terms in the asymptotic expansion of the heat kernel trace. These results are applied to study the asymptotic distribution of the eigenvalues.