Spectral properties and conformal type of surfaces

Abstract

In this short note, we announce a result relating the geometry of a riemannian surface to the positivity of some operators on this surface (the operators considered here are of the form surface Laplacian plus a scalar multiple of the curvature function). In particular we obtain a theorem "à la Huber'': under a spectral hypothesis we prove that the surface is conformally equivalent to a Riemann surface with a finite number of points removed. This problem has its origin in the study of stable minimal surfaces.