Localization of the first eigenfunction of a convex domain

Abstract

We study the first Dirichlet eigenfunction of the Laplacian in a $n$-dimensional convex domain. For domains of a fixed inner radius, estimates of Chiti imply that the ratio of the $L^2$-norm and $L^{\infty}$-norm of the eigenfunction is minimized when the domain is a ball. However, when the eccentricity of the domain is large the eigenfunction should spread out at a certain scale and this ratio should increase. We make this precise by obtaining a lower bound on the $L^2$-norm of the eigenfunction and show that the eigenfunction cannot localize to too small a subset of the domain. As a consequence, we settle a conjecture of van den Berg, in the general $n$-dimensional case. The main feature of the proof is to obtain sufficiently sharp estimates on the first eigenvalue in order to estimate the first derivatives of the eigenfunction.