Asymptotic properties of the heat kernel on conic manifolds (Q1424113)

Conical manifolds are among the simplest examples of singular Riemannian manifolds. On such manifolds there exists a natural class of differential operators, called cone operators. Examples include the Laplacian and the Dirac operator (in the spin case) of cone metrics. In this paper Loya finds an asymptotic expansion of the function \(t\mapsto \text{Tr}(Be^{-tA})\) as \(t\to 0\), where \(B\) is a cone differential operator, \(A\) is fully elliptic cone differential operator, and the trace is the operator trace on a weighted \(L^2\) space. Note that for \(B=1\) the corresponding expansion was given in [\textit{J. B. Gil}, Math. Nachr. 250, 25--57 (2003; Zbl 1018.58014)]. We refer to the paper for the details of the expansion; we can only mention that it contains \(\log t\) terms, and also extra fractional powers of \(t\) as compared to the \(B=1\) case. For \(B=1\) and \(A\) positive, the heat trace expansion and Karamata's theorem imply the usual Weyl growth law for the counting function of the eigenvalues of \(A\). This follows already from the above cited result of Gil, but Loya additionally identifies the leading coefficient. Moreover, the method of proof allows him to extend this asymptotic law to the so-called spectral function. The proof depends on previous results of the same author; one idea of the proof, due to \textit{R. B. Melrose} [The Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem, Research Notes in Mathematics (Boston, Mass.). 4. Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters (1993; Zbl 0796.58050)], is to describe the resolvent of \(A\) via its Schwartz kernel lifted to an appropriate manifold with corners. A key contribution of Loya is the introduction of several classes of parameter-dependent symbols, which will undoubtedly find other important applications.