CALCULATION OF THE ENTROPY FROM THE HEAT KERNEL IN A SPACETIME WITH ACONICAL SINGULARITY

The present Brief Report deals with some difficulties recently encount ered when trying to reobtain the Susskind-Uglum entropy in a conically singular spacetime by heat-kernel expansion. As alternatives, smoothi ng the singularity, cutting it off, and conformally going to the (nons ingular) optical metric have been considered by several authors. Here, we show that by using mathematical results on singular manifolds and the orthodox definition of the heat kernel and zeta function a direct treatment of the conical singularity is possible. In particular, this can be done by applying standard zeta-function regularization methods.