This is a work with Yves Colin de Verdière, Charlotte Dietze and Maarten De Hoop, motivated by recent works by M. De Hoop on inverse problems for sound wave propagation in gas giant planets. On such planets, the speed of sound is isotropic and tends to zero at the surface. Geometrically, this corresponds to a Riemannian manifold with a boundary whose metric blows up near the boundary. With appropriate variable changes, we can reduce the study of the Laplacian?Beltrami to that of a kind of sub-Riemannian Laplacian. In this talk, I will explain how to approach the spectral analysis of such operators, and in particular how to calculate WeylÕs law.[-]

In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the p-Laplacian, which plays an important role in geometry and partial differential equations. The p-Laplacian is a natural generalization of the Laplacian. Although the Laplacian has been much studied, not much is known about the nonlinear case p >1. Motivated by these facts, the purpose of the present paper is to review recent developments in the spectral theory of a specific class of quantum waveguides modeled by the Dirichlet Laplacian, i.e. p = 2, in unbounded tubes of uniform cross-section rotating w.r.t. the Tang frame along infinite curves in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension. We discuss how the spectrum depends upon three geometric deformations: straightness, asymptotic straightness, and bending. Precisely, if the reference curve is straight or asymptotic straight, the essential spectrum is preserved. While dealing with bent tubes, such geometry produces a spectrum below the first eigenvalue. All the results confirm the literature for the Laplacian operator. The results are obtained via a very delicate analysis since the nonlinearity given by the p-Laplacian operator adds different types of difficulties with respect to the linear situation. These results are contained in a work written jointly with D. Krejčiřík.[-]

Polyakov's formula expresses a difference of zeta-regularized determinants of Laplace operators, an anomaly of global quantities, in terms of simple local quantities. Such a formula is well known in the case of closed surfaces (Osgood, Philips, & Sarnak 1988) and surfaces with smooth boundary (Alvarez 1983). Due to the abstract nature of the definition of the zeta-regularized determinant of the Laplacian, it is typically impossible to compute an explicit formula. Nonetheless, Kokotov (genus one Kokotov & Klochko 2007, arbitrary genus Kokotov 2013) demonstrated such a formula for polyhedral surfaces ! I will discuss joint work with Clara Aldana concerning the zeta regularized determinant of the Laplacian on Euclidean domains with corners. We determine a Polyakov formula which expresses the dependence of the determinant on the opening angle at a corner. Our ultimate goal is to determine an explicit formula, in the spirit of Kokotov's results, for the determinant on polygonal domains.[-]