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Spectral Asymptotics Revisited

We introduce two new heuristic ideas concerning the spectrum of a Laplacian, and we give theorems and conjectures from the realms of manifolds, graphs and fractals that validate these heuristics. The first heuristic concerns Laplacians that do not have discrete spectra: here we introduce a notion of "spectral mass", an average of the diagonal of the kernel of the spectral projection operator, and show that this can serve as a substitute for the eigenvalue counting function. The second heuristic is an "asymptotic Schur's lemma" that describes the proportions of the spectrum that transforms according to the irreducible representations of a finite group that acts as a symmetric group of the Laplacian. For this to be valid we require the existence of a fundamental domain with relatively small boundary. We also give a version in the case that the symmetry groups is a compact Lie group. Many of our results are reformulations of known results, and some are merely conjectures, but there is something to be gained by looking at them together with a new perspective.