Spectral decomposition of square-tiled surfaces (Q943393)

A square-tiled surface is a collection of \(N\) unit squares \(S_0\) with identifications of the opposite sides, which can be endowed with a flat metric with some conical points. In this paper, the author deals with the Laplacian associated to such a metric and shows that it belongs to a particular class of operators: the selfadjoint operators defined (uniquely) from a certain quadratic form, which is considered on the set of points of \(\bigl[H^1(S_0)\bigr]^N\) that satisfy a boundary condition given by two unitary matrices \(H,V\) acting on \({\mathbb C}^N\). Here, \(H^1(S_0)\) denotes the usual Sobolev space. The author proves a general spectral decomposition theorem and derives conditions on the matrices \(H,V\) in order to get a precise decomposition of the spectrum of the Laplacian operator; in particular, if \(H,V\) are permutation matrices, it gives the decomposition of the spectrum of the square-tiled surface defined by the corresponding permutations.