Riemannian manifolds whose Laplacians have purely continuous spectrum (Q811533)

Suppose \(M^ n\) is a complete, noncompact, Riemannian manifold. The Laplacian \(\Delta\) defines an unbounded operator on \(L^ 2(M^ n)\). In general, \(\Delta\) may have both point and continuous spectrum. The paper under review establishes conditions on the manifold \(M^ n\), which ensure that the spectrum is purely continuous. The approach relies on an integral identity, originally due to Rellich in the case \(M^ n=\mathbb{R}^ n\). Suppose \(X\) is a \(C^ 1\) vector field, on \(M^ n\), with bounded covariant derivatives \(X_{i,j}\). Assume that \(X_{i,j}+X_{j,i}\geq 0\). Then \(-\Delta\) has no \(L^ 2\) eigenfunction, with positive eigenvalue, if one of the following holds: (i) There exists \(p\in M^ n\) such that \(X_{i,j}+X_{j,i}>0\) at \(p\) and \(\text{div} X \equiv n\) on \(M^ n\); (ii) For some \(b>0\) there exists \(\varepsilon=\varepsilon(M^ n,b)>0\) sufficiently small such that \(X_{i,j}+X_{j,i} \geq 2(b- \varepsilon)g_{ij}\) and \(|\text{div} X-n| < \varepsilon\) on \(M^ n\); (iii) \(X_{i,j}+X_{j,i} \geq (\text{div} X-n)g_{ij}\), \(0 \leq\text{div} X-n\) and either inequality holds strictly at least at one point \(p\in M^ n\). The above criteria are applied to study perturbations of rotationally symmetric metrics. In a different direction, let \(M^ 2\) be a complete surface admitting a conformal vector field \(X\) having at most linear growth. If \(\text{div} X \geq 0\) and \(\text{div} X > 0\) at some point \(p\in M^ 2\), then \(-\Delta\) has no \(L^ 2\) eigenfunctions with positive eigenvalues.