Isospectral orbifolds with different maximal isotropy orders (Q960010)

The authors consider good Riemannian orbifolds, ie quotients of Riemannian manifolds M by groups of isometries acting properly and discontinuously on M. The isotropy group of a given point in such an orbifold is the isomorphism class of its stabilizer, and the order of this group is the isotropy order of the point. The first result is that there exist isospectral orbifolds (ie with same spectrum for the related Laplace operators) with different maximal isotropy orders. The authors also consider several explicit examples of 3 dimensional flat orbifolds which are isospectral on functions and not on 1-forms, have same maximal isotropy orders but have other properties (e.g. the sets of points of maximal isotropy order may have different dimensions in the two orbifolds).