Around the Transfer Operator and the Trotter-Kato Formula

In preceding papers we have shown how the analysis of the transfer matrix method in statistical mechanics permits us to get a very natural result for the splitting for the transfer matrix. The purpose of this note is to analyze the link between this result and previous results obtained by J.Sjostrand concerning the splitting between the two first eigenvalues of the Schrodinger operator. We present here improved results and analyze as a byproduct the convergence in the Trotter-Kato formula in a particular (non abstract but relatively general) case. As is known this is strongly related with the Feynman-Kac formula.