Hearing Shapes via p-Adic Laplacians

Abstract: For a finite graph, a spectral curve is constructed as the zero set of a two-variate polynomial with integer coefficients coming from p-adic diffusion on the graph. It is shown that certain spectral curves can distinguish non-isomorphic pairs of isospectral graphs, and can even reconstruct the graph. This allows the graph reconstruction from the spectrum of the associated p-adic Laplacian operator. As an application to p-adic geometry, it is shown that the reduction graph of a Mumford curve and the product reduction graph of a p-adic analytic torus can be recovered from the spectrum of such operators.