Spectral rigidity of two-dimensional Liouville tori

Abstract

It is a folklore conjecture that Liouville metrics are the only Riemannian metrics with integrable geodesic flow on the two-dimensional torus. In this paper, we study Laplace-isospectral deformations, within a fixed conformal class, of generic Liouville metrics and prove two rigidity results: First, any isospectral deformation that is affine in $ε$ within the fixed conformal class is trivial. Second, any isospectral deformation that is analytic in the perturbation parameter and whose Taylor coefficients are trigonometric polynomials in the spatial variables remains Liouville and is obtained by componentwise rearrangement of the original metric. For the first result, the proof combines a wave-trace noncancellation result, which allows us to recover suitable length data from the Laplace spectrum, with a second-variation analysis of the energy functional along closed geodesics. For the second result, we prove that, within the Liouville class considered here, the relevant length-isospectrality condition is equivalent to componentwise rearrangement.