Spectral theory of complete Riemannian manifolds (Q547850)

The paper under review is a survey on the spectrum of the Laplace operator on noncompact Riemannian manifolds, published in a special issue in honor of Atiyah and Singer. The survey is divided in three sections: section 1 is devoted to (non existence of non zero) square integrable eigenfunctions, section 2 deals with the question (of the absence of) embedded eigenvalues and section 3 is concerned with the spectral stability, in particular it is shown that any Riemannian symmetric space of the noncompact type is spectrally stable. The survey is rather precise and complete, pointing out the main difficulties in passing from compact manifolds to noncompact ones. It also contains proofs of several results along with examples.