Robin Spectral Rigidity of the Ellipse

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate $$C^1$$ isospectral deformations of the ellipse with Robin boundary conditions, allowing both the Robin function and domain to deform simultaneously. We prove that if the deformations preserve the reflectional symmetries of the ellipse, then the first variation of both the domain and Robin function must vanish. If the deformation is in fact smooth, reparametrizing allows us to show that the first variation actually vanishes to infinite order. In particular, there exist no such analytic isospectral deformations. The key ingredients are a version of Hadamard’s variational formula for variable Robin boundary conditions and an oscillatory integral representation of the wave trace variation which uses action angle coordinates for the billiard map. For the latter, we in fact construct an explicit parametrix for the wave propagator in the interior, microlocally near geodesic loops.