Conformally invariant non-local operators. (Q700603)

Conformally invariant differential operators have an important role in physics. The classical field equations describing massless particles, for example the Maxwell and Dirac equations, depend only on conformal structure. New applications to natural geometric variational principles and physical least action principles have pointed-out the importance of non-local objects, e.g., pseudo-differential operators and values and residues of spectral zeta and eta functions and of boundary value problems. The paper under review deals with operators of odd integer order which can be described exactly in terms of boundary value problems. Such operators are very important in the theory of extremals of the functional determinant, a fundamental object in String Theory [see, for instance, the first author and \textit{P. Gilkey}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 344, 479--531 (1994; Zbl 0811.58060)]. These operators are closely related to harmonic analytic sharp inequalities of Sobolev imbedding and Moser-Trudinger type. The authors construct conformally invariant local boundary conditions \(B\) for the conformally invariant power of the Laplacian \(\square_k\) on a conformal manifold with boundary, with the property that \((\square_k,B)\) is formally self-adjoint. These boundary problems are used to construct conformally invariant non-local operators on the boundary \(\Sigma\), generalizing the conformal Dirichlet-to-Robin operator, with principal parts which are odd powers of \((-\Delta_{\Sigma})^{1/2}\), where \(\Delta_{\Sigma}\) is the boundary Laplace operator. Interesting remarks conclude the present paper.