English

Hearing the Sides: Recovering a Planar Rectangle from Eigenvalues

Spectral Theory 2025-12-19 v2

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 (m,n)(m,n) 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 λ1,0\lambda_{1,0} and λ0,1\lambda_{0,1} cannot be used. Our reconstruction procedure extracts geometric information solely from the asymptotic density and oscillatory structure of the ordered spectrum. The area abab is obtained from the high-frequency Weyl slope, while the fundamental lengths 2a2a and 2b2b 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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:59:08.864Z