Determinants of Laplacians on sectors and surfaces with conical singularities.

I will talk about current on going work with Julie Rowlett and Klaus Kristen. In previous work with J. Rowlett, we proved a formula for the derivative of the determinant of the Laplace operator on convex euclidean sectors with respect to the opening angle. However, while comparing our formula with an equivalent formula proved by K. Kirsten using different methods, we found a missing term. I will present this term and present the formula for angles of the form pi/n. I will introduce the terminology and present some motivation and tools for this work.