Christina Sormani, CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College
 
The Covering Spectrum of a Riemannian Manifold
I will speak about work with Guofang Wei of UC Santa Barbara. In 2004, we defined a new concept called the covering spectrum which roughly measures the size of one dimensional "holes" in a Riemannian manifold and demonstrated that, on a compact space, the covering spectrum is a subset of the (1/2) length spectrum, is determined by the marked length spectrum and can be used to select a special sequence of generators of the fundamental group. The covering spectrum was defined using a sequence of covering spaces, called the delta covers, and we proved that the universal cover is such a delta cover. None of these results hold for complete noncompact spaces even when one adds the condition that the spaces are locally compact. Recently, we have proven corresponding theorems for complete spaces, providing examples to show they are exact. In addition we have defined and analyzed two new spectra: the cut-off covering spectrum which measures holes that do not have the loops to infinity property, and the rescaled covering spectrum which measures holes that grow linearly at infinity.