We answer Mark Kacs famous question - can one hear the shape of a drum - in the negative for orbifolds that are spherical space forms. This is done by extending the techniques developed by A. Ikeda on Lens Spaces to the orbifold setting. Several results are proved to show that with certain restrictions on the dimensionalities of orbifold Lens spaces we can obtain infinitely many pairs of isospectral non-isometric Lens spaces. These results are then generalized to show that for any dimension greater than 8 we can have pairs of isospectral non-isometric orbifold Lens spaces.
We answer Mark Kac's famous question, "can one hear the shape of a drum?" in the positive for orbifolds that are 3-dimensional and 4-dimensional lens spaces; we thus complete the answer to this question for orbifold lens spaces in all dimensions. We also show that the coefficients of the asymptotic expansion of the trace of the heat kernel are not sufficient to determine the above results.
To what extent does the eigenvalue spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a compact Riemannian manifold determine the geometry of the manifold? We give examples of isospectral manifolds with different local geometry including continuous families of isospectral negatively curved manifolds with boundary as well as various pairs of manifolds. The latter illustrate that the spectrum does not determine whether a manifold with boundary has negative curvature, whether it has constant Ricci curvature, and whether it has parallel curvature tensor, and the spectrum does not determine whether a clo…
An old problem asks whether a Riemannian manifold can be isospectral to a Riemannian orbifold with nontrivial singular set. In this short note we show that under the assumption of Schanuel's conjecture in transcendental number theory, this is impossible whenever the orbifold and manifold in question are length-commensurable compact locally symmetric spaces of nonpositive curvature associated to simple Lie groups.
We generalize Sunada's method to produce new examples of closed, locally non-isometric manifolds which are isospectral. In particular, we produce pairs of isospectral, simply-connected, locally non-isometric normal homogeneous spaces. These pairs also allow us to see that in general group actions with discrete spectra are not determined up to measurable conjugacy by their spectra. In particular, we show this for lattice actions.
We construct pairs and continuous families of isospectral yet locally non-isometric orbifolds via an equivariant version of Sunada's method. We also observe that if a good orbifold $\mathcal{O}$ and a smooth manifold $M$ are isospectral, then they cannot admit non-trivial finite Riemannian covers $M_1 \to \mathcal{O}$ and $M_2 \to M$ where $M_1$ and $M_2$ are isospectral manifolds.
We construct several new classes of isospectral manifolds with different local geometries. After reviewing a theorem by Carolyn Gordon on isospectral torus bundles and presenting certain useful specialized versions (Chapter 1) we apply these tools to construct the first examples of isospectral four-dimensional manifolds which are not locally isometric (Chapter 2). Moreover, we construct the first examples of isospectral left invariant metrics on compact Lie groups (Chapter 3). Thereby we also obtain the first continuous isospectral families of globally homogeneous manifolds and the first examp…
We first show that a Laplace isospectral family of Riemannian orbifolds, satisfying a lower Ricci curvature bound, contains orbifolds with points of only finitely many isotropy types. If we restrict our attention to orbifolds with only isolated singularities, and assume a lower sectional curvature bound, then the number of singular points in an orbifold in such an isospectral family is universally bounded above. These proofs employ spectral theory methods of Brooks, Perry and Petersen, as well as comparison geometry techniques developed by Grove and Petersen.
In this paper we consider three arithmetic families of isospectral non-isometric Riemannian orbifolds and in each case derive an upper bound for the size of the family which is polynomial as a function of the volume of the orbifolds. The first family that we consider are those constructed by Vigneras' method. The second and third families are those whose covering groups are the minimal covolume arithmetic subgroups and maximal arithmetic subgroups of PGL_2(R)^a x PGL_2(C)^b.
We make a computational study to know what kind of isospectralities among lens spaces and lens orbifolds exist considering the Hodge--Laplace operators acting on smooth $p$-forms. Several evidenced facts are proved and some others are conjectured.
We construct isospectral non isometric metrics on real and complex projective space. We recall the construction using isometric torus actions by Carolyn Gordon in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we will recall some facts about complex projective space. In chapter 4 we build the isospectral metrics. Chapter 5 is devoted to the non isometry proof of the metrics built in chapter 4. In chapter 6 isospectral metrics on real projective space are derived from metrics on the sphere.
We construct the first examples of families of bad Riemannian orbifolds which are isospectral with respect to the Laplacian but not isometric. In our case these are particular fixed weighted projective spaces equipped with isospectral metrics obtained by a generalization of Schüth's version of the torus method.
We give a simple geometric characterization of isospectral orbifolds covered by spheres, complex projective spaces and the quaternion projective line having cyclic fundamental group. The differential operators considered are Laplace-Beltrami operators twisted by characters of the corresponding fundamental group. To prove the characterization, we first give an explicit description of their spectra by using generating functions. We also include many isospectral examples.
We study isospectrality for manifolds with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions and express the well-known transplantation method in graph- and representation-theoretic terms. This leads to a characterization of transplantability in terms of monomial relations in finite groups and allows for the generating of new transplantable pairs from given ones as well as a computer-aided search for isospectral pairs. In particular, we show that the Dirichlet spectrum of a manifold does not determine whether it is connected and that an orbifold can be Dirichlet isospectral to a manifold.
We study torsional rigidity for graph and quantum graph analogs of well-known pairs of isospectral non-isometric planar domains. We prove that such isospectral pairs are distinguished by torsional rigidity.
We consider the $G$-invariant spectrum of the Laplacian on an orbit space $M/G$ where $M$ is a compact Riemannian manifold and $G$ acts by isometries. We generalize the Sunada-Pesce-Sutton technique to the $G$-invariant setting to produce pairs of isospectral non-isometric orbit spaces. One of these spaces is isometric to an orbifold with constant sectional curvature whereas the other admits non-orbifold singularities and therefore has unbounded sectional curvature. We therefore show that constant sectional curvature and the presence of non-orbifold singularities are inaudible to the G-invaria…
We continue our exploration of the extent to which the spectrum encodes the local geometry of a locally homogeneous three-manifold and find that if $(M,g)$ and $(N,h)$ are a pair of locally homogeneous, locally non-isometric isospectral three-manifolds, where $M$ is an elliptic three-manifold, then $(1)$ $N$ is also an elliptic three-manifold, $(2)$ $M$ and $N$ have fundamental groups of different orders, $(3)$ $(M,g)$ and $(N,h)$ both have non-degenerate Ricci tensors and $(4)$ the metrics $g$ and $h$ are sufficiently far from a metric of constant sectional curvature. We are unaware of any su…
All the known counterexamples to Kac' famous question "can one hear the shape of a drum", i.e., does isospectrality of two Laplacians on domains imply that the domains are congruent, consist of pairs of domains composed of copies of isometric building blocks arranged in different ways, such that the unitary operator intertwining the Laplacians acts as a sum of overlapping "local" isometries mapping the copies to each other. We prove and explore a complementary positive statement: if an operator intertwining two appropriate realisations of the Laplacian on a pair of domains preserves disjoint s…
We study the relationship between the arithmetic and the spectrum of the Laplacian for manifolds arising from congruent arithmetic subgroups of SL(1,D), where D is an indefinite quaternion division algebra defined over a number field F. We give new examples of isospectral but non-isometric compact, arithmetically defined varieties, generalizing the class of examples constructed by Vigneras. These examples are based on an interplay between the simply connected and adjoint group and depend explicitly on the failure of strong approximation for the adjoint group. The examples can be considered as …
We obtain an analog of Weyl's law for the Kohn Laplacian on lens spaces. We also show that two 3-dimensional lens spaces with fundamental groups of equal prime order are isospectral with respect to the Kohn Laplacian if and only if they are CR isometric.
In this paper we report on recent results by several authors, on the spectral theory of lens spaces and orbifolds and similar locally symmetric spaces of rank one. Most of these results are related to those obtained by the authors in [IMRN (2016), 1054--1089], where the spectra of lens spaces were described in terms of the one-norm spectrum of a naturally associated congruence lattice. As a consequence, the first examples of Riemannian manifolds isospectral on $p$-forms for all $p$ but not strongly isospectral were constructed. We also give a new elementary proof in the case of the spectrum on…
