Periodic manifolds with spectral gaps (Q1864646)

A spectral gap in the essential spectrum of a positive operator \(H\) is an open interval \((a,b)\) such that \((a,b)\cap\text{Spec} H=\emptyset\). A Riemannian manifold is said to be periodic if there is an abelian group \(\Gamma\) acting properly discontinuously, isometrically and co-compactly on it. In this paper the author constructs, for each \(N\), a non-compact periodic manifold such that the essential spectrum of the Laplacian has at least \(N\) open gaps. In the first example, one starts from a compact Riemannian manifold \(X\), without boundary, and an abelian group \(\Gamma\) with \(r\) generators. One selects \(2r\) different points and endows each point with a cylindrical end (having boundary isometric to a sphere of radius \(\varepsilon>0\)) thus obtaining a period cell \(M_{\varepsilon}\). The desired periodic manifold \(\mathcal M_{\varepsilon}\) is obtained by gluing together \(\Gamma\) copies of the period cell \(M_{\varepsilon}\). Theorem 1.1. Each spectral band of the periodic Laplacian \(\Delta_{\mathcal M_{\varepsilon}}\) tends to an eigenvalue of the Laplacian \(\Delta_X\) on \(X\) as \(\varepsilon\to 0\). In particular, for each \(N\) there exist at least \(N\) open gaps in the spectrum of \(\Delta_{\mathcal M_{\varepsilon}}\) provided that \(\varepsilon\) is small enough. Similar results are obtained when the cells are connected with long thin cylinders of fixed length (Theorem 1.2) or when on a given periodic manifold one deforms the metric \(g\) by a (periodic) conformal factor (Theorem 1.3). A discussion follows on known results about spectral gaps. The author finally remarks that his results do not say anything whether the number of gaps is finite or not.