Heat Equations and Hearing the Genus on p-adic Mumford Curves via Automorphic Forms

A self-adjoint operator is constructed on the $L_2$-functions on the $K$-rational points $X(K)$ of a Mumford curve $X$ defined over a non-archimedean local field $K$. It generates a Feller semi-group, and the corresponding heat equation describes a Markov process on $X(K)$. Its spectrum is non-positive, contains zero and has finitely many limit points which are the only non-eigenvalues, and correspond to the zeros of a given regular differential 1-form on $X(K)$. This allows to recover the genus of X from the spectrum. The hyperelliptic case allows in principle an explicit genus extraction.