Disjointness-preserving operators and isospectral Laplacians

Abstract

The most commonly considered counterexamples to Kac’s famous question “can one hear the shape of a drum?” – i.e., does isospectrality of two Laplacians on domains imply that the domains are congruent? – consist of pairs of domains composed of copies of isometric building blocks arranged in different ways, such that the unitary operator intertwining the Laplacians acts as a sum of overlapping “local” isometries mapping the copies to each other.

We prove and explore a complementary positive statement: if an operator intertwining two appropriate realisations of the Laplacian on a pair of domains preserves disjoint supports, then under additional assumptions on it generally far weaker than unitarity, the domains are congruent. We show this in particular for the Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin Laplacians on spaces of continuous functions and on $L^2$-spaces.