Ricci Flow and the Determinant of the Laplacian on Non-Compact Surfaces

Abstract

On compact surfaces with or without boundary, Osgood, Phillips and Sarnak proved that the maximum of the determinant of the Laplacian within a conformal class of metrics with fixed area occurs at a metric of constant curvature and, for negative Euler characteristic, exhibited a flow from a given metric to a constant curvature metric along which the determinant increases. The aim of this paper is to perform a similar analysis for the determinant of the Laplacian on a non-compact surface whose ends are asymptotic to hyperbolic funnels or cusps. In that context, we show that the Ricci flow converges to a metric of constant curvature and that the determinant increases along this flow.