A cornucopia of isospectral pairs of metrics on spheres with different local geometries

Z. I. Szabo

Published 2000-11-05, updated 2003-03-05Version 2

This article concludes the comprehensive study started in [Sz5], where the first non-trivial isospectral pairs of metrics are constructed on balls and spheres. These investigations incorporate 4 different cases since these balls and spheres are considered both on 2-step nilpotent Lie groups and on their solvable extensions. In [Sz5] the considerations are completely concluded in the ball-case and in the nilpotent-case. The other cases were mostly outlined. In this paper the isospectrality theorems are completely established on spheres. Also the important details required about the solvable extensions are concluded in this paper. A new so called anticommutator technique is developed for these constructions. This tool is completely different from the other methods applied in the field so far. It brought a wide range of new isospectrality examples. Those constructed on geodesic spheres of certain harmonic manifolds are particularly striking. One of these spheres is homogeneous (since it is the geodesic sphere of a 2-point homogeneous space) while the other spheres, although isospectral to the previous one, are not even locally homogeneous. This shows how little information is encoded about the geometry (for instance, about the isometries) in the spectrum of Laplacian acting on functions.