Length spectrum ($\{\ell (\gamma )\}$)

The unmarked length spectrum of a compact hyperbolic surface is the multiset of lengths of its closed geodesics, with a consistent convention for primitive curves and orientation. The marked version labels lengths by free homotopy classes. The Selberg trace formula relates the unmarked multiset to the Laplace-Beltrami operator spectrum.

For a closed hyperbolic surface with a specified marking of its fundamental group, assign to each nontrivial conjugacy class the length of its unique closed geodesic. Retaining the group label is stronger than retaining only the unmarked length multiset: it also records which lengths belong to intersecting curves or powers of particular curves.

For closed hyperbolic surfaces of curvature $-1$, equality of the Laplace-Beltrami operator spectra, including multiplicities, is equivalent to equality of the unmarked length spectra of closed geodesics. The Selberg trace formula proves the equivalence. Primitive lengths with multiplicities and the multiset including their iterates determine one another, provided the same orientation convention is used.

In a compact smooth family of marked closed hyperbolic surfaces, only finitely many free homotopy classes of closed geodesics have length below a fixed bound somewhere in the family. A uniform bilipschitz equivalence with a fixed metric reduces this to local finiteness of its length spectrum.

For fixed genus $g\ge 2$ and systole lower bound $\epsilon >0$, a uniform finite length cutoff $L$ determines the entire unmarked length spectrum of a closed hyperbolic surface in the thick part, including multiplicities. Equality up to $L$ forces equality everywhere. This is a finite-determination statement for spectra and does not claim that all isospectral surfaces are isometric.

Suppose a compact parameter set carries a locally finite countable multiset of positive quantities, and a fixed injective transform of each labelled quantity is a polynomial in finitely many ambient coordinates. Assume only finitely many labels can have bounded value anywhere in the compact set. Then a uniform finite initial multiset determines the entire multiset. For each source label there are finitely many possible matching labels. Equality for finitely many labels in both directions is a finite union of algebraic sets, obtained from injective matchings and polynomial equalities. These algebraic sets decrease as more labels are included, so they stabilize by the Hilbert basis theorem. A compatible infinite matching in each direction follows by the König infinity lemma, and local finiteness makes multiplicities equal. Squared traces of hyperbolic holonomy representations give the application to the Buser finite length spectrum theorem.

For a compact hyperbolic surface, the Selberg trace formula equates a sum over Laplace-Beltrami operator eigenvalues to an area term and a sum over primitive closed geodesics and their iterates. It proves that the Laplacian spectrum and the unmarked length spectrum, with multiplicities, determine each other.