Quantitative spectral rigidity for negatively curved manifolds and Outer Space

Abstract

Let $M$ be a closed manifold with fundamental group $G$. A subset of conjugacy classes $E\subset \text{conj}(G)$ is said to be spectrally rigid if when two negatively curved Riemannian metrics have the same marked length spectra on $E$, then their length spectra agree on all conjugacy classes. In this work we study spectrally rigid subsets from a quantitative perspective. We show that, if the density of $E\subset \text{conj}(G)$, measured with respect to a fixed reference metric, decays more slowly than $T^{-1/2}$ then $E$ is spectrally rigid. We establish analogous rigidity results for Culler-Vogtmann Outer Space and show that the $T^{-1/2}$ threshold is sharp in this setting.

arXiv comment19 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Journal of Topology