Tetra and Didi, the cosmic spectral twins (Q1882847)

By a flat manifold we shall understand a closed Riemannian manifold with a constant sectional curvature equal to zero. A platycosm is a flat 3-manifold. The simplest among the platycosms are the 3-dimensional tori called torocosms. It is well known that all platycosms arise as quotients of torocosms. There are 10 distinct types in all of which 6 (torocosm, dicosm, tricosm, tetracosm, hexacosm, didicosm) are orientable. The spaces themselves are well known, but the naming scheme, due to Conway, is new [see \textit{J. H. Conway} and \textit{J. P. Rossetti}, Describing the platycosms, arXive:math DG/0311476]. In this very interesting paper the authors consider the tetracosm (holonomy \(\mathbb{Z}_4\)) and didicosm (holonomy \(\mathbb{Z}_2\times \mathbb{Z}_2\)). They prove, that these 3-manifolds are isospectral. By definition, two spaces are isospectral if there exists some way of matching up the eigenfunctions of the Laplacian of the two spaces such that corresponding eigenfunctions have the same eigenvalue. The authors mention three proofs of the isospectrality of the above flat manifolds (the cosmic spectral twins). They present two of it. One is entirely elementary using only linear algebra and Fourier series, the second one, which is the main result of the paper, uses the Selberg trace formula. The version of the trace formula that is used expresses the Laplace transform of the spectrum as the sum of contributions attributable to families of closed geodesics. Hence they classify geodesics into tetracosms and didicosms. Finally, we have to mention that the first example of spectral twins was a pair of 16-dimensional tori [cf. \textit{J. Milnor}, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 51, 542 (1964; Zbl 0124.31202)].