Isospectral towers of Riemannian manifolds (Q713044)

In this article, infinitely many families of isospectral towers of Riemannian manifolds are constructed. Here a tower is defined as a family of compact Riemannian manifolds~\((M_i)_{i\in \mathbb{N}}\) such that there exist finite Riemannian covers \(M_{i+1}\to M_i\) for all \(i\). A family \(((M_i^j)_{i\in \mathbb{N}})_{j=1,\ldots,m}\) of such towers is a family of isospectral towers of cardinality~\(m\), if for all \(i\in \mathbb{N}\) and all \(j,k\in\{1,2,\ldots,m\}\) the manifolds \(M_i^j\) and \(M_i^k\) have the same spectrum of the Laplace operator on functions. The author shows that for all \(m,n\geq 2\) there are infinitely many families of isospectral towers of compact \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian manifolds, where each family has cardinality \(m\). The construction of these families uses genera of quaternion orders which then lead to suitable arithmetic groups. The Riemannian manifolds \(M_i^j\) thus obtained are quotients of products of copies of the \(2\)- and \(3\)-dimensional hyperbolic space. The author also shows that his examples cannot be obtained from Sunada's method.