Collapsing of Riemannian manifolds and eigenvalues of Laplace operator (Q1074206)

In this paper, we discuss the perturbation of eigenvalues of Laplace operators under deformation of manifolds, which does not preserve topological types. The main result concerns the case when curvatures and diameters are uniformly bounded. The most interesting phenomenon occurring under this restriction is that manifolds collapse to a lower dimensional space. It is proved that, in that case, the eigenvalues converge to that of the differential operator on the limit space which, in general, has a regular singularity at the singular point of the space. There are also some discussions on the case in which the curvatures are not bounded. The discussion in that case is not systematic but gives several examples which seem to the author to be typical.