Convergence of spectra of graph-like thin manifolds (Q556136)

The authors study the convergence of the spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on compact manifolds which shrink, with respect to an appropriate parameter, to a graph. Three cases are considered: 1) The shrinking at the vertex parts of the manifold is faster compared to that of the edge parts. The limiting spectrum is then the spectrum of the Lapacian on the graph with Kirchoff boundary conditions at the vertices. 2) If the shrinking at the vertex is slower compared to the that at the edges, the limiting spectrum corresponds to decoupled edges with Dirichlet boundary conditions at the end points. 3) At the borderline between these two regimes one has a third possibility where the limiting spectrum can be described by a non-trivial coupling at the vertices. Finally the authors give an application of the spectral convergence in the case of periodic graphs. In particular, they show the existence of gaps in the spectrum of certain non-compact periodic graph-like manifolds. For example, attaching a loop at each vertex gives rise to spectral gaps.