The influence of the spectrum of the symmetrized fourth order operator on the geometry of a Riemannian manifold (Q1822065): Difference between revisions

Let M be a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold without boundary. There are many different natural fourth order differential operators which can be constructed from multiple covariant differentiation ';'. One of the most natural which also appears in the work of \textit{A. Gray} and \textit{T. J. Willmore} [Proc. R. Soc. Edinb., Sect. A 92, 343-364 (1982; Zbl 0495.53040)] is the symmetrized Laplacian \(D(f)=(f_{;iijj}+f_{;ijij}+f_{;ijji})/3.\) The author uses the first three terms in the asymptotics of the heat equation to study the extent to which the geometry of M is reflected by its spectrum. Many of the results relating the spectrum of the second order Laplacian to the geometry of M carry over to this fourth order operator. For example, the author shows that the standard sphere or real projective space in dimension 2 is characterized by the spectrum of D; there are many other similar results in this paper.