Abstract.Given an open set Ω, we consider the problem of providing sharp lower bounds for λ2(Ω), i.e. its second Dirichlet eigenvalue of the p−Laplace operator. After presenting the nonlinear analogue of the Hong-Krahn-Szego inequality, asserting that the disjoint unions of two equal balls minimize λ2 among open sets of given measure, we improve this spectral inequality by means of a quantitative stability estimate. The extremal cases p = 1 and p = ∞ are considered as well.
IntroductionIn this paper, we are concerned with Dirichlet eigenvalues of the p−Laplace operatorwhere 1 < p < ∞. For every open set Ω ⊂ R N having finite measure, these are defined as the real numbers λ such that the boundary value problemhas non trivial (weak) solutions. In particular, we are mainly focused on the following spectral optimization problemwhere c > 0 is a given number, λ 2 (·) is the second Dirichlet eigenvalue of the p−Laplacian and | · | stands for the N −dimensional Lebesgue measure. We will go back on the question of the well-posedness of this problem in a while, for the moment let us focus on the particular case p = 2: in this case we are facing the eigenvalue problem for the usual Laplace operator and, as it is well known, Dirichlet eigenvalues form a discrete nondecreasing sequence of positive real numbers 0 < λ 1 (Ω) ≤ λ 2 (Ω) ≤ λ 3 (Ω) ≤ . . . , going to ∞. In particular, it is meaningful to speak of a second eigenvalue so that problem (1.1) is well-posed and we know that its solution is given by any disjoint union of two balls having measure c/2. Moreover, these are the only sets which minimize λ 2 under volume constraint. Using the scaling properties both of the eigenvalues of −∆ and of the Lebesgue measure, we can reformulate the previous result in scaling invariant form as follows