Liouville Equations and Functional Determinants

Abstract: Functional Determinants are quantities constructed out of spectra of conformally covariant operators, and are explicit in dimension two and four, due to formulas by Polyakov and Branson-Oersted. Extremizing them in a conformal class amounts to solving Liouville equations with principal parts of different order but all scaling invariant. We discuss some existence, uniqueness, non-uniqueness results and some open problems. This is joint work with M.Gursky and P.Esposito.