Polyakov formulas for conical singularities in two dimensions

Journal article, 2025

We investigate the zeta-regularized determinant and its variation in the presence of conical singularities, boundaries, and corners. For surfaces with isolated conical singularities which may also have one or more smooth boundary components, we demonstrate both a variational Polyakov formula as well as an integrated Polyakov formula for the conformal variation of the Riemannian metric with conformal factors which are smooth up to all singular points and boundary components. We demonstrate the analogous result for curvilinear polygonal domains in surfaces. We then specialize to finite circular sectors and cones and via two independent methods obtain variational Polyakov formulas for the dependence of the determinant on the opening angle. Notably, this requires the conformal factor to be logarithmically singular at the vertex. We further obtain explicit formulas for the determinant for finite circular sectors and cones.