Tau functions for the Dirac operator on the cylinder

The goal of the present paper is to calculate the determinant of the Dirac operator with a mass in the cylindrical geometry. The domain of this operator consists of functions that realize a unitary one-dimensional representation of the fundamental group of the cylinder with n marked points. The determinant represents a version of the isomonodromic tau-function, introduced by M. Sato, T. Miwa and M. Jimbo. It is calculated by comparison of two sections of the det*-bundle over an infinite-dimensional grassmannian. The latter is composed of the spaces of boundary values of some local solutions to the Dirac equation. The principal ingredients of the computation are the formulae for the Green function of the singular Dirac operator and for the so-called canonical basis of global solutions on the 1-punctured cylinder. We also derive a set of deformation equations satisfied by the expansion coefficients of the canonical basis in the general case and find a more explicit expression for the tau-function in the simplest case n=2.