Sarnak’s spectral gap question

We answer in the affirmative a question of Sarnak’s from 2007, confirming that the Patterson–Sullivan base eigenfunction is the unique square-integrable eigenfunction of the hyperbolic Laplacian invariant under the group of symmetries of the Apollonian packing. Thus the latter has a maximal spectral gap. We prove further restrictions on the spectrum of the Laplacian on a wide class of manifolds coming from Kleinian sphere packings.