The diffractive wave trace on manifolds with conic singularities (Q329534)

Under a generic nonconjugacy assumption, the authors compute the principal amplitude of the singularities of the trace of the half-wave group \(e^{-it \sqrt{\Delta _{g}}},\) where \(\Delta _{g}\) is the Friedrichs extension of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a compact manifold \((X,g)\) with conic singularities, in terms of invariants associated to the geodesic and data from the cone point. They prove an analogue of the Duistermaat-Guillemin trace formula on compact manifolds with conic singularities (or conic manifolds), generalizing results of L. Hillairet from the case of flat surfaces with conic singularities. The paper starts with a review of the geometry of manifolds with conic singularities, in particular the geometry of geodesics and Jacobi fields. Section 2 contains the calculation of the principal amplitude of the diffractive part of the half-wave propagator near the cone point of a metric cone, Section 3 generalizes this calculation to the wider class of conic manifolds. In Section 4, the authors calculate the principal amplitude of a multiply-diffracted wave on a manifold with (perhaps multiple) cone points, and the proofs of the required results are given in Sections 5 and 6. Using a microlocal partition of unity developed in Section 7, the trace of the half-wave group along the diffractive closed geodesics is computed in Section 8. The article ends with an appendix, a brief review of the theory of Lagrangian distributions and their amplitudes.