Laplacians on flat line bundles over 3-manifolds

The well-known Laplace–Beltrami operator, established as a basic tool in shape processing, builds on a long history of mathematical investigations that have induced several numerical models for computational purposes. However, the Laplace–Beltrami operator is only one special case of many possible generalizations that have been researched theoretically. Thereby it is natural to supplement some of those extensions with concrete computational frameworks. In this work we study a particularly interesting class of extended Laplacians acting on sections of flat line bundles over compact Riemannian manifolds. Numerical computations for these operators have recently been accomplished on twodimensional surfaces. Using the notions of line bundles and differential forms, we follow up on that work giving a more general theoretical and computational account of the underlying ideas and their relationships. Building on this we describe how the modified Laplacians and the corresponding computations can be extended to three-dimensional Riemannian manifolds, yielding a method that is able to deal robustly with volumetric objects of intricate shape and topology. We investigate and visualize the two-dimensional zero sets of the first eigenfunctions of the modified Laplacians, yielding an approach for constructing characteristic well-behaving, particularly robust homology generators invariant under isometric deformation. The latter include nicely embedded Seifert surfaces and their nonorientable counterparts for knot complements. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.