Steklov Spectral Geometry for Annular Surfaces: Inverse spectral results and isospectral compactness

Abstract

We study the inverse spectral problems for the Steklov spectrum on compact surfaces with boundary. We prove that among flat annular surfaces, the lateral surface of a conical frustum is uniquely determined by its Steklov spectrum. As a consequence, each circular annulus is uniquely determined among all planar domains, providing the first example of a non-simply connected Euclidean domain with this property. Furthermore, we show that any family of Steklov isospectral flat annular surfaces is compact in the $C^\infty$ topology, extending previous results for simply connected planar domains. These results are established through a detailed analysis of the spectral zeta function and the zeta-regularized determinant associated with the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator for annular surfaces.