Towards a Fractal Cohomology: Spectra of Polya–Hilbert Operators, Regularized Determinants and Riemann Zeros

Emil Artin defined a zeta function for algebraic curves over finite fields and made a conjecture about them analogous to the famous Riemann hypothesis. This and other conjectures about these zeta functions would come to be called the Weil conjectures, which were proved by Weil in the case of curves and eventually, by Deligne in the case of varieties over finite fields. Much work was done in the search for a proof of these conjectures, including the development in algebraic geometry of a Weil cohomology theory for these varieties, which uses the Frobenius operator on a finite field. The zeta function is then expressed as a determinant, allowing the properties of the function to relate to the properties of the operator. The search for a suitable cohomology theory and associated operator to prove the Riemann hypothesis has continued to this day. In this paper we study the properties of the derivative operator D = d d z $$D = \frac{d} {dz}$$ on a particular family of weighted Bergman spaces of entire functions on ℂ $$\mathbb{C}$$ . The operator D can be naturally viewed as the “infinitesimal shift of the complex plane” since it generates the group of translations of ℂ $$\mathbb{C}$$ . Furthermore, this operator is meant to be the replacement for the Frobenius operator in the general case and is used to construct an operator associated with any given meromorphic function. With this construction, we show that for a wide class of meromorphic functions, the function can be recovered by using a regularized determinant involving the operator constructed from the meromorphic function. This is illustrated in some important special cases: rational functions, zeta functions of algebraic curves (or, more generally, varieties) over finite fields, the Riemann zeta function, and culminating in a quantized version of the Hadamard factorization theorem that applies to any entire function of finite order. This shows that all of the information about the given meromorphic function is encoded into the special operator we constructed. Our construction is motivated in part by work of Herichi and the second author on the infinitesimal shift of the real line (instead of the complex plane) and the associated spectral operator, as well as by earlier work and conjectures of Deninger on the role of cohomology in analytic number theory, and a conjectural “fractal cohomology theory” envisioned in work of the second author and of Lapidus and van Frankenhuijsen on complex fractal dimensions.