Spectral geometry on nilmanifolds (Q4366606)

Two compact Riemannian manifolds are said to be isospectral if the eigenvalues of their Laplacians on functions are the same with the same multiplicities. Isospectral manifolds have many geometric quantities in common. M. Kac raised the question of whether isospectral manifolds were isometric. Around 1964, Milnor found the first example of two nonisometric isospectral manifolds. Many counterexamples have been given during the last 20 years. An important source for new examples are Riemannian nilmanifolds. A Riemannian nilmanifold is a compact quotient of a simply connected nilpotent Lie group \(G\). These manifolds admit a rich algebraic structure and many facts are known on their geometric and analytic properties. The paper under review is a survey article on methods to construct isospectral nilmanifolds with different geometric and analytic properties. The authors consider three techniques for constructing such manifolds. Two methods work with representation theoretic methods, while the third method expresses the spectrum of certain nilmanifolds as the union of the spectrum of lower dimensional nilmanifolds and so the dimension of the problem is reduced. The first method uses the notion of representation equivalent subgroups of \(G\). This means, the corresponding quasi-regular representations are unitary equivalent. The constructed isospectral nilmanifolds have the same spectrum for all natural strongly elliptic operators. The second method uses a weaker condition on the representations. This technique gives nilmanifolds, where the Laplacians acting on functions are isospectral but the Laplacians acting on \(p\)-forms are not isospectral. However, all these manifolds have a common Riemannian covering and are thus all locally isometric. The third method constructs isospectral, nonlocally isometric two-step nilmanifolds. The paper is written in a very nice and instructive way. The authors restrict themselves on the most important definitions, theorems and examples. The proofs are given in a clear and concise way. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0874.00038].