Determinants of Laplacians in Exterior Domains

We consider classes of simply connected planar domains which are isophasal, ie, have the same scattering phase s(λ) for all λ > 0. This is a scattering-theoretic analogue of isospectral domains. Using the heat invariants and the determinant of the Laplacian, Osgood, Phillips and Sarnak showed that each isospectral class is sequentially compact in a natural C∞ topology. This followed earlier work of Melrose who showed that the set of curvature functions k(s) is compact in C∞. In this paper, we show sequential compactness of each isophasal class of domains. To do this we define the determinant of the exterior Laplacian and use it together with the heat invariants (the heat invariants and the determinant being isophasal invariants). We show that the determinant of the interior and exterior Laplacians satisfy a Burghelea-Friedlander-Kappeler type surgery formula. This allows a reduction to a problem on bounded domains for which the methods of Osgood, Phillips and Sarnak can be adapted.