Existence and Regularity of Extremal Metrics for the Conformal Dirichlet-to-Robin Map

We study the variational properties of the spectrum of the Dirichlet-to-Robin map $\mathcal{D}_g$ on connected compact manifolds with boundary of dimension at least three. For the first eigenvalue, we show that Type II Yamabe metrics extremize the first normalized eigenvalue functional, and we characterize all extremals. If $[g]$ is a conformal class for which $\mathcal{D}_g$ has at least two negative eigenvalues, then we show the existence of a generalized metric that maximizes the second normalized eigenvalue of $\mathcal{D}_g$ in the conformal class. Moreover, we show that each such metric either defines a solution to an Escobar--Yamabe type equation on manifolds with boundary that changes sign along the boundary, or a weakly free-boundary harmonic map into the unit Euclidean ball.