Isospectral potentials and conformally equivalent isospectral metrics on spheres, balls and Lie groups (Q1407754)

The authors construct pairs of conformally equivalent isospectral Riemannian metrics \(\phi_1g\) and \(\phi_2 g\) on spheres \(S^n\) and \(B^{n+1}\) for certain dimensions \(n\), the smallest of which is \(n=7\), and on certain compact simple Lie groups. Furthermore, they show that for the same manifolds \((M,g)\) the Schrödinger operators \(\hbar^2\Delta +\phi_1\) and \(\hbar^2\Delta +\phi_2\) are isospectral for \(\hbar\in{\mathbb R}\setminus \{0\}\). The paper starts with a good overview over the existing examples of pairs of isospectral manifolds, together with a short description about the techniques involved. After the introductory part, the first section explains the main method of the article which is based on the torus action method. The examples provided in the article are pairs of compact Riemannian manifolds \((M,g)\), \((M',g')\) with an isometric (non-free) action of a torus \(T\). For each subtorus \(W\) of codimension \(1\) of \(T\) there is a volume preserving \(W\)-equivariant diffeomorphism \(M\to M'\) which is compatible with the potentials. It is shown that in this situation the Laplacians (resp. the Schrödinger operators) have the same spectrum. The following sections construct the actual examples on certain balls, spheres and Lie groups. In particular, the authors have to spend some time to prove that the pairs actually consist of non-isometric manifolds. The careful reader of the article will enjoy that clear and abstract reasoning is used here to avoid extensive calculations. The final section contains some comments on how one may adapt the techniques to construct other new examples.