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The heat-kernel expansion and ζ-regularization techniques for quantum field theory and extended objects on curved space-times are reviewed. In particular, ultrastatic space-times with spatial section consisting in manifold with constant curvature are discussed in detail. Several mathematical results, relevant to physical applications are presented, including exact solutions of the heat-kernel equation, a simple exposition of hyperbolic geometry and an elementary derivation of the Selberg trace formula. With regards to the physical applications, the vacuum energy for scalar fields, the one-loop renormalization of a self-interacting scalar field theory on a hyperbolic space-time, with a discussion on the topological symmetry breaking, the finite temperature effects and the Bose-Einstein condensation, are considered. Some attempts to generalize the results to extended objects are also presented, including some remarks on path integral quantization, asymptotic properties of extended objects and a novel representation for the one-loop (super)string free energy.

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The thermodinamic properties of the (2+1)-dimensional non-rotating black hole of Bañados, Teitelboim and Zanelli are discussed. The first quantum correction to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is evaluated within the on-shell Euclidean formalism, making use of the related Chern-Simons representation of the 3-dimensional gravity. Horizon and ultraviolet divergences in the quantum correction are dealt with a renormalization of the Newton constant. It is argued that the quantum correction due to the gravitational field shrinks the effective radius of a hole and becomes more and more important as soon as the evaporation process goes on, while the area law is not violated.

There is a remarkable connection between quantum generating functions of field theory and formal power series associated with dimensions of chains and homologies of suitable Lie algebras. We discuss the homological aspects of this connection with its applications to partition functions of the minimal three-dimensional gravities in the space-time asymptotic to AdS 3 , which also describe the three-dimensional Euclidean black holes, the pure N = 1 supergravity, and a sigma model on N-fold generalized symmetric products. We also consider in the same context elliptic genera of some supersymmetric sigma models. These examples can be considered as a straightforward application of the machinery of modular forms and spectral functions (with values in the congruence subgroup of SL(2, Z)) to partition functions represented by means of formal power series that encode Lie algebra properties.

The Ray-Singer torsion for a compact smooth hyperbolic 3-dimensional manifold H 3 is expressed in terms of Selberg zeta-functions, making use of the associated Selberg trace formulae. Applications to the evaluation of the semiclassical asymptotics of the Witten's invariant for the Chern-Simons theory with gauge group SU (2) as well as to the sum over topologies in 3-dimensional quantum gravity are presented.

The estimates of the gluon concentrations in the classical SU(3)-Yang-Mills field modelling confinement are given for the first three states of charmonium whose spectrum is tuned by calculating electromagnetic transitions among the mentioned levels in dipole approximation. For comparison the corresponding estimates for the photon concentration in the ground state of positronium (parapositronium and orthopositronium) are also adduced.

We study M-theory and D-brane quantum partition functions for microscopic black hole ensembles within the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence in terms of highest weight representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, elliptic genera, and Hilbert schemes, and describe their relations to elliptic modular forms. The common feature in our examples lie in the modular properties of the characters of certain representations of the pertinent affine Lie algebras, and in the role of spectral functions of hyperbolic three-geometry associated with q-series in the calculation of elliptic genera. We present new calculations of supergravity elliptic genera on local Calabi-Yau threefolds in terms of BPS invariants and spectral functions, and also of equivariant D-brane elliptic genera on generic toric singularities. We use these examples to conjecture a link between the black hole partition functions and elliptic cohomology.