Old and New Aspects in Spectral Geometry

This work presents results and techniques concerning the spectral geometry corresponding to the Laplace-Beltrami operator and the Hodge-de Rham operators. It treats many topics that are not usually dealt with in this field, such as the continuous dependence of the eigenvalues with respect to the Riemannian metric in the C-topology, and some of their consequences, such as Uhlenbeck's genericity theorem; examples of non-isometric flat tori in all dimensions greater than or equal to four; Gordon's classical technique for constructing isospectral closed Riemannian manifolds; a detailed presentation of Sunada's technique and Pesce's approach to isospectrality; Gordon and Webb's example of non-isometric convex domains in Rn (n>=4) that are isospectral for both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions; the Chanillo-Treves estimate for the first positive eigenvalue of the Hodge-de Rham operator, and more. Significant applications are developed, and many open problems, references and suggestions for further reading are given. Several themes for additional research are pointed out.