On the spectral resolution of products of Laplacian eigenfunctions (Q2301863)

Summary: We study products of eigenfunctions of the Laplacian \(-\Delta \phi_{\lambda} = \lambda \phi_{\lambda}\) on compact manifolds. If \(\phi_{\mu}, \phi_{\lambda}\) are two eigenfunctions and \(\mu \leq \lambda \), then one would perhaps expect their product \(\phi_{\mu}\phi_{\lambda}\) to be mostly a linear combination of eigenfunctions with eigenvalue close to \(\lambda \). This can faily quite dramatically: on \(\mathbb{T}^2\), we see that \[2\sin{(n x)} \sin{((n+1) x)} = \cos{(x)} - \cos{( (2n+1) x)}\] has half of its \(L^2-\) mass at eigenvalue 1. Conversely, the product \[\sin{(n x)} \sin{(m y)}\] lives at eigenvalue \[\max{\left\{m^2,n^2\right\}} \leq m^2 + n^2 \leq 2\max{\left\{m^2,n^2\right\}}\] and the heuristic is valid. We show that the main reason is that in the first example 'the waves point in the same direction': if the heuristic fails and multiplication carries \(L^2-\) mass to lower frequencies, then \(\phi_{\mu}\) and \(\phi_{\lambda}\) are strongly correlated at scale \(\sim \lambda^{-1/2}\) (the shorter wavelength) \[ \left\| \int_M{ p(t,x,y)( \phi_{\lambda}(y) - \phi_{\lambda}(x))( \phi_{\mu}(y) - \phi_{\mu}(x)) dy} \right\|_{L^2_x} \gtrsim \| \phi_{\mu}\phi_{\lambda}\|_{L^2},\] where \(p(t,x,y)\) is the classical heat kernel and \(t \sim \lambda^{-1}\). This turns out to be a fairly fundamental principle and is even valid for the Hadamard product of eigenvectors of a Graph Laplacian.