Laplacians and spectrum for singular foliations (Q2257066)

The author surveys \textit{A. Connes}' results [Lect. Notes Math. 725, 19--143 (1979; Zbl 0412.46053)] on the longitudinal Laplace operator along a (regular) foliation and its spectrum (Theorems 3.1 and 3.2), and discuss their generalization to any singular foliation (i.e., leaves may have non-constant dimension) on a compact manifold. Namely, he proves (Theorem 5.1) that the Laplacian of a singular foliation is an essentially self-adjoint operator (unbounded) and has the same spectrum in every faithful representation, in particular, in \(L^2\) of the manifold and \(L^2\) of a leaf. He also discusses briefly the relation of the Baum-Connes assembly map with the calculation of the spectrum.