Sharp Bounds for Nodal Sets of Steklov Eigenfunctions on Smooth Surfaces

Abstract

We prove a sharp linear upper bound for the interior nodal length of Steklov eigenfunctions on smooth compact Riemannian surfaces with boundary, establishing the upper bound predicted by the Steklov analogue of Yau's conjecture in dimension two. On each fixed surface, we also show that the nodal length divided by the logarithm of the eigenvalue tends to infinity, uniformly over the eigenfunctions. We construct examples to show this divergence can be arbitrarily slow. These examples rule out every general lower bound by a positive power of the eigenvalue, in contrast with the linear lower bound on analytic surfaces by Polterovich-Sher-Toth. Moreover, boundary zero counts and both interior and boundary nodal domain counts satisfy sharp linear bounds for large eigenvalues. We also prove density estimates for boundary zeros on at least one boundary component and construct a fixed analytic cylinder on which another component remains free of boundary zeros along an unbounded sequence of eigenvalues.