Isospectral potentials and conformally equivalent isospectral metrics on spheres, balls and Lie groups

Gordon, Carolyn S.; Schueth, Dorothee

Isospectral potentials and conformally equivalent isospectral metrics on spheres, balls and Lie groups

Authors

Description

We construct pairs of conformally equivalent isospectral Riemannian metrics $ϕ_1 g$ and $ϕ_2 g$ on spheres $S^n$ and balls $B^{n+1}$ for certain dimensions $n$, the smallest of which is $n=7$, and on certain compact simple Lie groups. In the case of Lie groups, the metric $g$ is left-invariant. In the case of spheres and balls, the metric $g$ is not the standard metric but may be chosen arbitrarily close to the standard one. For the same manifolds $(M,g)$ we also show that the functions $ϕ_1$ and $ϕ_2$ are isospectral potentials for the Schrödinger operator $\hbar^2Δ+ϕ$. To our knowledge, these are the first examples of isospectral potentials and of isospectral conformally equivalent metrics on simply connected closed manifolds.
34 pages, AMS-TeX; revised subsection 5.1