Variations on a theme of Jost and Pais

We explore the extent to which a variant of a celebrated formula due to Jost and Pais, which reduces the Fredholm perturbation determinant associated with the Schrödinger operator on a half-line to a simple Wronski determinant of appropriate distributional solutions of the underlying Schrödinger equation, generalizes to higher dimensions. In this multi-dimensional extension the half-line is replaced by an open set Ω⊂Rn, n∈N, n⩾2, where Ω has a compact, nonempty boundary ∂Ω satisfying certain regularity conditions. Our variant involves ratios of perturbation determinants corresponding to Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions on ∂Ω and invokes the corresponding Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. As a result, we succeed in reducing a certain ratio of modified Fredholm perturbation determinants associated with operators in L2(Ω;dnx), n∈N, to modified Fredholm determinants associated with operators in L2(∂Ω;dn−1σ), n⩾2. Applications involving the Birman–Schwinger principle and eigenvalue counting functions are discussed.