Isospectral compact flat manifolds (Q1210417)

It was shown by \textit{J. Milnor} [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 51, 542 (1964; Zbl 0124.312)] that there exist pairs of isospectral, nonisometric flat tori of dimension 16. (It is now known that such tori exist in dimension \(\geq 8\) [\textit{Y. Kitaoka}, Arch. Math. 28, 495-497 (1977; Zbl 0361.10019)].) Also, each isospectral class of compact flat Riemannian manifolds contain finitely many isometry classes [\textit{T. Sunada}, Comment. Math. Helv. 53, 613-621 (1978; Zbl 0422.53023)]. The purpose of the present paper is to show that isospectrality is quite a common phenomenon among compact flat manifolds, even in low dimensions, and with zero first Betti number (see Corollary 3.2). Our main result is the following theorem. Theorem 1.1. If \(n\geq 5\), there exist pairs of isospectral nonhomeomorphic compact flat Riemannian manifolds \(M\), \(\overline{M}\) of dimension \(n\), with holonomy group \(Z^ k_ 2\), \(2 \leq k\leq n-3\). Furthermore, \(M\), \(\overline{M}\) can be chosen so that \(\beta_ 1 = h\) for any \(h\) with \(1 \leq h\leq n-3\), \(i = 1,2\). If \(n\geq 6\), then we can choose \(M\), \(\overline{M}\) to have \(\beta_ 1 = 0\), \(i = 1,2\) and holonomy group \(Z^ k_ 2\) for any \(k\) with \(3 \leq k\leq n-3\).