Applications of spectral geometry to affine and projective geometry (Q1892774)

Equiaffine differential geometry was developed by Blaschke and his school. In particular, one of the first global affine results is Blaschke's characterization of the ellipsoid within the class of ovaloids by the constancy of its equiaffine mean curvature. This result has been obtained considering a Laplace type equation and generalizing properties of the first eigenspace of the Laplacian on a sphere. Later on, this point of view was generalized by Schneider who introduced operators which relate transformation techniques for partial differential equations to conformal and projective structures. In this paper a systematic study of these operators is performed. Let \(M^m\) be a smooth, compact manifold, \(TM\) and \(T^* M\) the tangent and cotangent bundles, \(S^2 M\) the bundle of symmetric covariant 2-tensors and \(g \in C^\infty (S^2 M)\) a Riemannian metric on \(M\). A conformal structure on \(M\) is an equivalence class of metrics with \(g \sim g_0\) if \(g = e^{2f} g_0\) for some \(f \in C^\infty (M)\). Let \(\Delta\) be a torsion free connection on \(TM\) and \(D^s (M)\) the set of all torsion free connections with symmetric Ricci tensor. A projective structure on \(M\) is an equivalence class \(P^s (\Delta)\) of connections which are projectively equivalent, i.e. there exists a 1-form \(\theta\) such that \((\widetilde {\Delta}_X - \Delta_X) Y = \theta(X)Y - \theta(Y)X\). The second-order partial differential operator \(D(g,\Delta^g) = \nabla_0 -(m - 1)^{-1} \tau_g\) with \(\Delta^g\) the Levi-Civita connection, \(\nabla_0\) Laplacian and \(\tau_g\) scalar curvature, is a differential operator which is neither the standard Laplacian nor the conformal Laplacian. In this paper the Laplace type operators \(D = D(g, \Delta)\) for \(\Delta \in D^s(M)\), constructed by contraction of the Hessian and of the Ricci tensor, are studied in detail. Their spectral asymptotics and their properties under conformal and projective transformations are examined. Spectral global invariants depending only on the conformal class of the metric and the projective class of the connection are given. It is also proved that the Pick functional in dimension 2 is a spectral invariant of these operators and this is used to relate Euclidean, equiaffine and centroaffine geometry on a given ovaloid. From this comparison a lower bound for the Willmore functional is given in terms of equiaffine data. The paper is very clear and the authors, considering that the subject deals with two quite different areas of mathematics as spectral geometry and affine differential geometry, use an expository language in some parts.