Partition function of massless scalar field in Schwarzschild background

Abstract

Using thermal value of zeta function instead of zero temperature, the partition function of quantized fields in arbitrary stationary backgrounds was found to be independent of undetermined regularization constant in even-dimension and the long drawn problem associated with the trace anomaly effect had been removed. Here, we explicitly calculate the expression for the coincidence limit so that the technique may be applied in some specific problems. A particular problem dealt with here is to calculate the partition function of massless scalar field in Schwarzschild background.