English

Where to place a spherical obstacle so as to maximize the second Dirichlet eigenvalue

Metric Geometry 2008-09-04 v1 Spectral Theory

Abstract

We prove that among all doubly connected domains of Rn\mathbb{R}^n bounded by two spheres of given radii, the second eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian achieves its maximum when the spheres are concentric (spherical shell). The corresponding result for the first eigenvalue has been established by Hersch in dimension 2, and by Harrell, Kr\"oger and Kurata and Kesavan in any dimension. We also prove that the same result remains valid when the ambient space Rn\mathbb{R}^n is replaced by the standard sphere Sn\mathbb{S}^n or the hyperbolic space Hn\mathbb{H}^n .

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0712.2033,
  title  = {Where to place a spherical obstacle so as to maximize the second Dirichlet eigenvalue},
  author = {Ahmad El Soufi and Rola Kiwan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0712.2033},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

To appear in Communications in Pure and Applied Analysis

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:53:28.351Z