Variations on a Theme of Jost and Pais

Abstract

We explore the extent to which a variant of a celebrated formula due to Jost and Pais, which reduces the Fredholm perturbation determinant associated with the Schrödinger operator on a half-line to a simple Wronski determinant of appropriate distributional solutions of the underlying Schrödinger equation, generalizes to higher dimensions. In this multi-dimensional extension the half-line is replaced by an open set $Ω\subset\bbR^n$, $n\in\bbN$, $n\geq 2$, where $Ω$ has a compact, nonempty boundary $\partialΩ$ satisfying certain regularity conditions. Our variant involves ratios of perturbation determinants corresponding to Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions on $\partialΩ$ and invokes the corresponding Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. As a result, we succeed in reducing a certain ratio of modified Fredholm perturbation determinants associated with operators in $L^2(Ω; d^n x)$, $n\in\bbN$, to modified Fredholm determinants associated with operators in $L^2(\partialΩ; d^{n-1}σ)$, $n\geq 2$. Applications involving the Birman-Schwinger principle and eigenvalue counting functions are discussed.