Robin conditions on the Euclidean ball

Techniques are presented for calculating directly the scalar functional determinant on the Euclidean d-ball. General formulae are given for Dirichlet and Robin boundary conditions. The method involves a large mass asymptotic limit which is carried out in detail for d=2 and d=4 incidentally producing some specific summations and identities. Extensive use is made of the Watson-Kober summation formula.Comment: 36p,JyTex, misprints corrected and a section on the massive case adde

Proof of a modular relation between 1-, 2- and 3-loop Feynman diagrams on a torus

The coefficients of the higher-derivative terms in the low energy expansion of genus-one graviton Type II superstring scattering amplitudes are determined by integrating sums of non-holomorphic modular functions over the complex structure modulus of a torus. In the case of the four-graviton amplitude, each of these modular functions is a multiple sum associated with a Feynman diagram for a free massless scalar field on the torus. The lines in each diagram join pairs of vertex insertion points and the number of lines defines its weight $w$, which corresponds to its order in the low energy expansion. Previous results concerning the low energy expansion of the genus-one four-graviton amplitude led to a number of conjectured relations between modular functions of a given $w$, but different numbers of loops $\le w-1$. In this paper we shall prove the simplest of these conjectured relations, namely the one that arises at weight $w=4$ and expresses the three-loop modular function $D_4$ in terms of modular functions with one and two loops. As a byproduct, we prove three intriguing new holomorphic modular identities.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figures, in version 2: Appendix D added and corrections made in section

Lower order terms in Szego type limit theorems on Zoll manifolds

This is a detailed version of the paper math.FA/0212273. The main motivation for this work was to find an explicit formula for a "Szego-regularized" determinant of a zeroth order pseudodifferential operator (PsDO) on a Zoll manifold. The idea of the Szego-regularization was suggested by V. Guillemin and K. Okikiolu. They have computed the second term in a Szego type expansion on a Zoll manifold of an arbitrary dimension. In the present work we compute the third asymptotic term in any dimension. In the case of dimension 2, our formula gives the above mentioned expression for the Szego-redularized determinant of a zeroth order PsDO. The proof uses a new combinatorial identity, which generalizes a formula due to G.A.Hunt and F.J.Dyson. This identity is related to the distribution of the maximum of a random walk with i.i.d. steps on the real line. The proof of this combinatorial identity together with historical remarks and a discussion of probabilistic and algebraic connections has been published separately.Comment: 39 pages, full version, submitte

Applications of the Mellin-Barnes integral representation

We apply the Mellin-Barnes integral representation to several situations of interest in mathematical-physics. At the purely mathematical level, we derive useful asymptotic expansions of different zeta-functions and partition functions. These results are then employed in different topics of quantum field theory, which include the high-temperature expansion of the free energy of a scalar field in ultrastatic curved spacetime, the asymptotics of the $p$-brane density of states, and an explicit approach to the asymptotics of the determinants that appear in string theory.Comment: 20 pages, LaTe