The Residue Determinant

The purpose of this paper is to present the construction of a canonical determinant functional on elliptic pseudodifferential operators associated to the Guillemin-Wodzicki residue trace. The resulting functional is multiplicative, a local invariant, and not defined by a regularization procedure. The residue determinant is consequently a quite different object to the zeta function (quasi-) determinant, which is non-local and non-multiplicative.