Spectral limits for hyperbolic surfaces. II (Q1207423)

The author continues the investigations of Part I reviewed above with other methods. He is again concerned with the behaviour of the spectrum when one or more geodesic is pinched. Here the pinching transformation is realized by an explicit quadratic differential which is constructed as a sort of Poincaré series. He estimates the Petersson inner product of two of these differentials under a pinching deformation. From this and an estimate on the variation of the eigenvalue under the deformation he can deduce that for a family of cusp forms then at least a subsequence of eigenvalues will converge either to a point of \([0,1/4]\) or to a discrete eigenvalue of one of the components of the pinched surface. The eigenfunctions, suitably normalized will also converge to an eigenfunction. The author also proves a limit formula which apparently allows him to prove yet finer results. He concludes the paper with a conjecture on the general situation which asserts that the behaviour in the cases of signature (1,1) and (2,0) is exceptional compared with all other cases.