Three's company in six dimensions: irreducible, isospectral, non-isometric flat tori

Abstract

In 1964, John Milnor, using a construction of two lattices by Witt, produced the first example of two flat tori that are not globally isometric and whose Laplacians for exterior forms have the same sequence of eigenvalues. The aforementioned flat tori are sixteen-dimensional. One is reducible while the second is irreducible. In the ensuing years, pairs of non-isometric flat tori that share a common Laplace spectrum have been shown to exist in dimensions four and higher. In dimensions three and lower, Alexander Schiemann proved in 1994 that any flat tori that are isospectral are in fact isometric, so four is the lowest dimension in which such pairs exist. Using a four-dimensional such pair, one can easily construct an eight-dimensional such triplet. However, triplets of mutually non-isometric flat tori that share a common Laplace spectrum in dimensions 4, 5, 6, and 7 have eluded researchers - until now. We present here the first example.