Heat kernel coefficients and spectra of the vector Laplacians on spherical domains with conical singularities

Abstract

The spherical domains with conical singularities are a convenient arena for studying the properties of tensor Laplacians on arbitrary manifolds with this type of singular point. In this paper the vector Laplacian on is considered and its spectrum is calculated exactly for any dimension d. This enables one to find the Schwinger - DeWitt coefficients of this operator by using the residues of the -function. In particular, the second coefficient, defining the conformal anomaly, is explicitly calculated on and its generalization to arbitrary manifolds is found. As an application of this result, the standard renormalization of the 1-loop effective action of gauge fields is demonstrated to be sufficient to remove the ultraviolet divergences up to first order in the conical deficit angle.