Zeta-determinants of Sturm–Liouville operators with quadratic potentials at infinity

Abstract

We consider Sturm–Liouville operators on a half line [a,∞),a>0, with potentials that are growing at most quadratically at infinity. Such operators arise naturally in the analysis of hyperbolic manifolds, or more generally manifolds with cusps. We establish existence and a formula for the associated zeta-determinant in terms of the Wronski-determinant of a fundamental system of solutions adapted to the boundary conditions. Despite being the natural objects in the context of hyperbolic geometry, spectral geometry of such operators has only recently been studied in the context of analytic torsion.