A short proof of a sharp Weyl law for the special orthogonal group (Q2179899)

Let \(M\) be a compact Riemannian manifold of dimension \(d\) and -\(\Delta\) the Laplace-Beltrami operator on \(M\). The spectrum of \(-\Delta\) is discrete with non-negative eigenvalues. Let \({\mathcal N}(\lambda)\) be the number of eigenvalues that are less or equal than a real number \(\lambda\) counted with their multiplicities. Weyl's law describes the asymptotic behavior of \({\mathcal N}(\lambda)\) as follows: \[\lim_{\lambda\rightarrow +\infty}\lambda^{-d/2}{\mathcal N}(\lambda)=C_d\] where \(\displaystyle{C_d:=\frac{2\text{Vol}(M)}{d(4\pi)^{d/2}\Gamma(d/2)}}\), \(\text{Vol}(M):=\int_M\omega\) and \(\omega\) is the Riemannian volume form. In the paper under review, the authors give a short and elementary proof of the Weyl's law in the case when \(M\) is the special orthogonal (compact Lie) group \(SO(N)\), where \(N\) is a positive integer and \(d=N(N-1)/2\) (Theorem 1.1): \[{\mathcal N}(\lambda)-C_d\lambda^{d/2}=\begin{cases}O(\lambda^{d/2-1})\text{ if }[N/2]>4\\ O(\lambda^{d/2-1}\log \lambda)\text{ if }[N/2]=4\end{cases} \] where \([N/2]\) denotes the greatest integer in \(N/2\) (i.e the rank of \(SO(N)\)).