Heat kernel on homogeneous bundles over symmetric spaces (Q842482)

The author considers Laplacians acting on sections of homogeneous vector bundles over symmetric spaces. By means of an integral representation of the heat semigroup a formal solution is obtained for the heat kernel diagonal that gives a generating function for the whole sequence of heat invariants. It is shown explicitly that the obtained result correctly reproduces the first non-trivial heat kernel coefficient as well as the exact heat kernel diagonals on the two-dimensional sphere \({\mathcal S}^{2}\) and the hyperbolic plane \({\mathcal H}^{2}.\) Finally, by means of a suitable regularization and analytical continuation it is proved that the obtained formal solution correctly reproduces the exact heat kernel diagonal.