The inaudible geometry of nilmanifolds (Q2366469)

An interesting question which bridges the fields of geometry and analysis is the following. To what extent does the Laplace spectrum of a Riemannian manifold determine the manifold's geometry? A construction of Gordon and Wilson of continuous one-parameter isospectral families of mutually non-isometric Riemannian manifolds leads to a related question, ``How can a drum change shape, while still sounding the same?'' The analysis of some of these isospectral deformations by the four authors of this paper suggested the possibility that these deformations could be detected by changes in either the geometry or the relative positions of volume-minimizing cycles. That observation led to the main result of this paper, namely their Drifting Subspaces Theorem. An informal version of this theorem asserts that if \(M\) is a compact Riemannian two-step nilmanifold with a nontrivial isospectral family \(\{g_ t\}\) of left- invariant metrics, there are invariantly defined families \(P_ 1(t),\dots,P_ k(t)\) of geodesics in \((M,g_ t)\) whose relative position changes with \(t\).