Essential spectrum of complete Riemannian manifolds (Q1201601)

The authors investigate the essential spectrum of the Laplacian on complete Riemannian manifolds. It was conjectured by Yau that there is no pure point spectrum on a manifold with nonnegative sectional curvature, in other words, the essential spectrum is \([0,+\infty)\). Such a result was confirmed by Escobar for manifolds with nonnegative radical sectional curvature outside a compact set and if the metric is rotationally symmetric. In this paper the authors generalize the Escobar results for wider class of metrics.