Expansions and eigenfrequencies for damped wave equations

We study eigenfrequencies and propagator expansions for damped wave equations on compact manifolds. In the strongly damped case, the propagator is shown to admit an expansion in terms of the finitely many eigenmodes near the real axis, with an error exponentially decaying in time. In the presence of an elliptic closed geodesic not meeting the support of the damping coefficient, we show that there exists a sequence of eigenfrequencies converging rapidly to the real axis. In the case of Zoll manifolds, the set of all eigenfrequencies is shown to exhibit a cluster structure determined by the Morse index of the closed geodesics and the damping coefficient averaged along the geodesic flow. We then show that the propagator can be expanded in terms of the clusters of eigenfrequencies in the entire spectral band.