Hearing pseudoconvexity in Lipschitz domains with holes via $${\bar{\partial }}$$ ∂ ¯

Let \(\Omega ={\widetilde{\Omega }}{\setminus } \overline{D}\) where \({\widetilde{\Omega }}\) is a bounded domain with connected complement in \({\mathbb {C}}^n\) (or more generally in a Stein manifold) and D is relatively compact open subset of \({\widetilde{\Omega }}\) with connected complement in \(\widetilde{\Omega }\). We obtain characterizations of pseudoconvexity of \({\widetilde{\Omega }}\) and D through the vanishing or Hausdorff property of the Dolbeault cohomology groups of \(\Omega \) on various function spaces. In particular, we show that if the boundaries of \({\widetilde{\Omega }}\) and D are Lipschitz and \(C^2\)-smooth respectively, then both \({\widetilde{\Omega }}\) and D are pseudoconvex if and only if 0 is not in the spectrum of the \(\overline{\partial }\)-Neumann Laplacian of \(\Omega \) on (0, q)-forms for \(1\le q\le n-2\) when \(n\ge 3\); or 0 is not a limit point of the spectrum of the \(\overline{\partial }\)-Neumann Laplacian on (0, 1)-forms when \(n=2\).