Further results on Functional Determinants of Laplacians in Simplicial Complexes

Abstract

We investigate the functional determinant of the laplacian on piece-wise flat two-dimensional surfaces, with conical singularities in the interior and/or corners on the boundary. Our results extend earlier investigations of the determinants on smooth surfaces with smooth boundaries. The differences to the smooth case are: a) different ``interaction energies'' between pairs of conical singularities than one would expect from a naive extrapolation of the results for a smooth surface; and b) ``self-energies'' of the singularities.