Hearing the Sides: Recovering a Planar Rectangle from Eigenvalues
Abstract
We present a direct, index-free method to recover the side lengths of a planar rectangle the spectrum of its Dirichelet Laplacian, assuming only access to a finite subset of eigenvalues. No modal indices are available, and the list may begin at an arbitrary unknown offset; in particular, the lowest eigenvalues may be missing, so classical formulas based on and cannot be used. Our reconstruction procedure extracts geometric information solely from the asymptotic density and oscillatory structure of the ordered spectrum. The area is obtained from the high-frequency Weyl slope, while the fundamental lengths and appear as dominant periodic--orbit contributions in the Fourier transform of the spectral fluctuations. This separation of smooth and oscillatory components yields a robust, offset-agnostic recovery of both side lengths. The result is a fully index-free algorithm that reconstructs the geometry of a rectangular planar domain even when the spectrum is incomplete and all modal information is lost.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.23047,
title = {Hearing the Sides: Recovering a Planar Rectangle from Eigenvalues},
author = {Eldar Sultanow and Andreas Hatziiliou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.23047},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure, 3 listings