David Borthwick (Emory University) Resonances of hyperbolic surfaces Abstract: The spectral theory of compact hyperbolic surfaces is an old topic with many interesting results, many of which originate in Atle Selberg's approach to the study of automorphic forms. Selberg's techniques also extend to non-compact surfaces of finite area, although the analysis is somewhat more difficult in this case. For hyperbolic surfaces of infinite area, however, much of the method that was so successful in the compact setting appears to fail. Although the basic spectral properties of such manifolds were worked out in the 1980's by Lax and Phillips, there were no clear infinite-area analogs for the beautiful results of the Selberg theory at that point. This situation started to change in the mid-1990's. Breakthroughs in geometric scattering theory, and in the theory of resonances in particular, have given us in the last 15 years a much more complete picture of the spectral theory of hyperbolic surfaces of infinite area. Many results of the Selberg theory from the compact case do turn out to have very close analogs in this setting, even though the spectral theory is radically different. In this talk we will attempt to give an accessible introduction the spectral theory of hyperbolic surfaces. After highlighting some of the classical results of the Selberg theory, our main goal will be to explain recent developments in the infinite-area case. |
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