Functional determinant on pseudo-Einstein 3-manifolds

Abstract

Given a three dimensional pseudo-Einstein CR manifold $(M,T^{1,0}M,\theta)$, we establish an expression for the difference of determinants of the Paneitz type operators $A_{\theta}$, related to the problem of prescribing the $Q'$-curvature, under the conformal change $\theta\mapsto e^{w}\theta$ with $w\in \P$ the space of pluriharmonic functions. This generalizes the expression of the functional determinant in four dimensional Riemannian manifolds established in \cite{BO2}. We also provide an existence result of maximizers for the scaling invariant functional determinant as in \cite{CY}.