The main purpose of this book is the study of local aspects of spectral analysis and spectral synthesis on Euclidean spaces, Riemannian symmetric spaces of an arbitrary rank and Heisenberg groups.  The subject can be viewed as arising from three classical topics: John's support theorem, Schwartz's fundamental principle, and Delsarte's two-radii theorem.

Highly topical, the book contains most of the significant recent results in this area with complete and detailed proofs. In order to make this book accessible to a wide audience, the authors have included an introductory section that develops analysis on symmetric spaces without the use of Lie theory. Challenging open problems are described and explained, and promising new research directions are indicated.

Designed for both experts and beginners in the field, the book is rich in methods for a wide variety of problems in many areas of mathematics.