English

Payne's nodal line conjecture fails on doubly-connected planar domains

Analysis of PDEs 2025-10-29 v1

Abstract

We present examples of bounded planar domains with one single hole for which the nodal line of a second Dirichlet eigenfunction is closed and does not touch the boundary. This shows that Payne's nodal line conjecture can at most hold for simply-connected domains in the plane.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.24436,
  title  = {Payne's nodal line conjecture fails on doubly-connected planar domains},
  author = {Pedro Freitas and Roméo Leylekian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.24436},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, including 5 figures and the appendix