Discreteness of the spectrum of the Laplacian and stochastic incompleteness (Q836234)

This paper presents a sufficient and necessary condition for a class of Riemannian manifolds such that the essential spectrum of the Laplacian is discrete, i.e., the essential spectrum is empty. The manifolds considered in the paper satisfy two assumptions: (1) outside a compact set the manifold consists of finitely many disjoint ends, and each end is diffeomorphic to \(\mathbb R_+\times K\) for a compact manifold \(K\); (2) each end is ``close to'' a warped product in the sense of mean curvature specified by (4) in the paper. Under these assumptions, a sufficient and necessary condition, similarly to the one dimensional case, is provided for the Laplacian operator to have an empty essential spectrum. As an application, when the manifold only has one end, which is much more close to the one-dimensional setting up to the product with a compact manifold, the manifold is proved to be stochastic complete if the essential spectrum of the Laplacian is not empty.