Properties of Laplacians and Riesz potentials on manifolds with ends (Q1345492)

As is well known, the Laplacian on a compact Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is a Fredholm operator from \(H^ p_{s + 2}(M)\) to \(H^ p_ s (M)\), where \(H^ p_ t (M)\) is the \(t\)-th order \(L^ p\) Sobolev space on \(M\) and its Fredholm inverse is a compact operator on \(H^ p_ s (M)\). For noncompact manifolds, the situation is more complicated. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the following conjecture: Let \((M,g)\) be a complete Riemannian manifold with finitely many ends, and let \(1 < p < \infty\). Then \(\Delta_ g : H^ p_{s + 2}(M) \to H^ p_ s(M)\) (1) is Fredholm if and only if each end is either expanding or contracting for all \(\rho\). (2) is an isomorphism if and only if each end is either expanding or contracting for all \(\rho\) and \(\text{Vol}(M) = \infty\), (3) has a Fredholm inverse that is a compact operator on \(H^ p_ s(M)\) if and only if \(\widehat{\tau}_ g (\rho) = \infty\) for all \(\rho\), where \(\rho : M \to \mathbb{R}\) is a compact exhaustion, \(\tau_ g(\rho)\) is an upper bound for the infimum of the essential spectrum of \(\Delta_ g\) on \(M\) and \(\widehat {\tau}(\rho)\) is a refinement of \(\widehat {\tau} (\rho)\). The main result of this paper is given by the following. Theorem. The conjecture is true for metrics that are quasi-isometric to warped products.