One of the many problems to which J.S. Dowker devoted his attention is the effect of a conical singularity in the base manifold on the behavior of the quantum fields. In particular, he studied the small-$t$ asymptotic expansion of the heat-kernel tra
ce on a cone and its effects on physical quantities, as the Casimir energy. In this article we review some peculiar results found in the last decade, regarding the appearance of non-standard powers of $t$, and even negative integer powers of $log{t}$, in this asymptotic expansion for the selfadjoint extensions of some symmetric operators with singular coefficients. Similarly, we show that the $zeta$-function associated to these selfadjoint extensions presents an unusual analytic structure.
We use the image charge method to compute the trace of the heat kernel for a scalar field on a flat manifold with boundary, representing the trace by means of a worldline path integral and obtain useful non-iterative master formulae for n insertions
of the scalar potential. We discuss possible extensions of the method.
