Abstract. We describe the complex poles of the power spectrum of correlations for the geodesic flow on compact hyperbolic manifolds in terms of eigenvalues of the Laplacian acting on certain natural tensor bundles. These poles are a special case of Pollicott-Ruelle resonances, which can be defined for general Anosov flows. In our case, resonances are stratified into bands by decay rates. The proof also gives an explicit relation between resonant states and eigenstates of the Laplacian.In this paper, we consider the characteristic frequencies of correlations,for the geodesic flow ϕ t on a compact hyperbolic manifold M of dimension n + 1 (that is, M has constant sectional curvature −1). Here ϕ t acts on SM , the unit tangent bundle of M , and µ is the natural smooth probability measure. Such ϕ t are classical examples of Anosov flows; for this family of examples, we are able to prove much more precise results than in the general Anosov case.An important question, expanding on the notion of mixing, is the behavior of ρ f,g (t) as t → +∞. Following [Ru], we take the power spectrum, which in our convention is the Laplace transformρ f,g (λ) of ρ f,g restricted to t > 0. The long time behavior of ρ f,g (t) is related to the properties of the meromorphic extension ofρ f,g (λ) to the entire complex plane. The poles of this extension, called Pollicott-Ruelle resonances (see [Po86a,Ru,FaSj] and (1.7) below), are the complex characteristic frequencies of ρ f,g , describing its decay and oscillation and not depending on f, g.For the case of dimension n + 1 = 2, the following connection between resonances and the spectrum of the Laplacian was announced in [FaTs13a, Section 4] (see [FlFo] for a related result and the remarks below regarding the zeta function techniques). Theorem 1. Assume that M is a compact hyperbolic surface (n = 1) and the spectrum of the positive Laplacian on M is (see Figure 1)