An equivariant Guillemin trace formula

Abstract

Guillemin's trace formula is an expression for the distributional trace of an operator defined by pulling back functions along a flow on a compact manifold. We obtain an equivariant generalisation of this formula, for proper, cocompact group actions. This is motivated by the construction of an equivariant version of the Ruelle dynamical $\zeta$-function in another paper by the same authors, which is based on the equivariant Guillemin trace formula. To obtain this formula, we first develop an equivariant version of the distributional trace that appears in Guillemin's formula and other places.