One can hear the corners of a drum (2012.06465v1)

Abstract: We prove that the presence or absence of corners is spectrally determined in the following sense: any simply connected domain with piecewise smooth Lipschitz boundary cannot be isospectral to any connected domain, of any genus, which has smooth boundary. Moreover, we prove that amongst all domains with Lipschitz, piecewise smooth boundary and fixed genus, the presence or absence of corners is uniquely determined by the spectrum. This means that corners are an elementary geometric spectral invariant; one can hear corners.