Abstract. The study of the heat-trace expansion in noncommutative field theory has shown the existence of Moyal nonlocal Seeley-DeWitt coefficients which are related to the UV/IR mixing and manifest, in some cases, the non-renormalizability of the theory. We show that these models can be studied in a worldline approach implemented in phase space and arrive at a master formula for the n-point contribution to the heat-trace expansion. This formulation could be useful in understanding some open problems in this area, as the heat-trace expansion for the noncommutative torus or the introduction of renormalizing terms in the action, as well as for generalizations to other nonlocal operators.

We study the oscillations of a scalar field on a noncommutative disc implementing the boundary as the limit case of an interaction with an appropriately chosen confining background. The space of quantum fluctuations of the field is finite dimensional and displays the rotational and parity symmetry of the disc. We perform a numerical evaluation of the (finite) Casimir energy and obtain similar results as for the fuzzy sphere and torus.