arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Iosif Polterovich.
In 1955, L. E. Payne conjectured that for a planar clamped plate, each buckling eigenvalue is at least as large as the Dirichlet Laplacian eigenvalue of the same domain with index shifted by one. We prove this conjecture for every odd buckling index.
Given a centrally symmetric convex body, consider the zero set of the Fourier transform of its characteristic function. We study how large the distance from this set to the origin can be when the volume of the body is fixed. A 2009 conjecture of Benguria, Levitin, and Parnovski asserts that the maximum is attained by a Euclidean ball. We disprove it in all dimensions greater than one. In the plane, every regular centrally symmetric polygon with at least twelve sides outperforms the disk, albeit by a tiny margin, and the regular dodecagon is best among them. In dimensions three and higher, no maximiser exists.
We prove comparison inequalities for Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps corresponding to different non-positive Helmholtz parameters. For convex domains our bounds are sharp, and the resulting eigenvalue inequalities partially confirm an earlier conjecture, which we show does not hold in full generality. We further obtain geometry-dependent versions for arbitrary sufficiently regular domains, together with extensions to compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary. We also discuss analogous questions for metric graphs.
We say that a convex body is in Faber-Krahn position if it minimizes the first Dirichlet eigenvalue within its volume-preserving linear orbit. We prove that this position is unique up to orthogonal transformations, answering a question of Schmuckenschlaeger from 2011. This is a corollary of a new log-convexity property of the first eigenvalue under positive definite linear deformations. While the centrally symmetric case follows from the Gaussian B-theorem, the extension to arbitrary convex bodies requires a quantitative analysis of conditioned Brownian motion. As consequences, we obtain a new proof of the Polya-Szego theorem for triangles and its analogue for simplices, and show that regular polygons minimize the first eigenvalue within their linear orbits of fixed volume. We also prove related convexity results for the first eigenvalue of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator, the inverse inradius and the planar Cheeger constant. In a different direction, we show using similar ideas that the Gaussian conjugate Rogers-Shephard inequality due to Milman-Nakamura-Tsuji yields improved Schmuckenschlaeger-type bounds for intersections and Minkowski sums of centrally symmetric convex bodies.
We prove Pólya's conjecture for the Neumann eigenvalues of the Laplacian on Euclidean balls in dimensions three and higher. The proof further develops the approach introduced in our earlier work on the two-dimensional case and on Dirichlet eigenvalues in arbitrary dimensions. The main difficulty in the higher dimensional Neumann case is that one has to estimate zeros of the derivatives of ultraspherical Bessel functions, rather than of the usual Bessel functions. For low-lying eigenvalues, we use variational estimates involving dimension-dependent test functions, which is a novel ingredient allowing us to control a larger dimension-scaled frequency range. Other components of the proof include phase-function bounds, lattice-point counting techniques, and computer-assisted arguments.
We investigate the Steklov eigenvalue problem in an exterior Euclidean domain. First, we present several formulations of this problem and establish the equivalences between them. Next, we examine various properties of the exterior Steklov eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. One of our main findings is an Escobar-type lower bound for the first exterior Steklov eigenvalue on convex domains in dimensions three and higher. This bound is expressed in terms of the principal curvatures of the boundary and is sharp, with equality attained for a ball. Moreover, it implies the existence of a sequence of convex domains with fixed volume and the first exterior Steklov eigenvalues tending to infinity. This contrasts with the interior case, as well as with the two-dimensional exterior case, for which we show that an analogue of the Weinstock isoperimetric inequality holds.
The study of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map and the associated Steklov problem for the Laplace equation has been a central topic in spectral geometry over the past decade. In this survey, we consider a more general framework in which the Laplace equation is replaced by the Helmholtz equation. We examine how the properties of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann eigenvalues and eigenfunctions depend on the parameter in the Helmholtz equation and describe new phenomena arising when this parameter is nonzero, as opposed to the Laplace case. In particular, we present various eigenvalue inequalities, analyse spectral asymptotics in different regimes, and investigate nodal domains and other features of eigenfunctions. We also discuss applications where the Helmholtz parameter plays an essential role, as well as challenges encountered in the numerical computation of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann spectrum.
We prove Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of the Dirichlet Laplacian on annular domains. Our approach builds upon and extends the methods we previously developed for disks and balls. It combines variational bounds, estimates of Bessel phase functions, refined lattice point counting techniques, and a rigorous computer-assisted analysis. As a by-product, we also derive a two-term upper bound for the Dirichlet eigenvalue counting function of the disk, improving upon Pólya's original estimate.
In the present paper we develop an approach to obtain sharp spectral asymptotics for Steklov type problems on planar domains with corners. Our main focus is on the two-dimensional sloshing problem, which is a mixed Steklov-Neumann boundary value problem describing small vertical oscillations of an ideal fluid in a container or in a canal with a uniform cross-section. We prove a two-term asymptotic formula for sloshing eigenvalues. In particular, this confirms a conjecture posed by Fox and Kuttler in 1983. We also obtain similar eigenvalue asymptotics for other related mixed Steklov type problems, and discuss applications to the study of Steklov spectral asymptotics on polygons.
We prove explicit uniform two-sided bounds for the phase functions of Bessel functions and of their derivatives. As a consequence, we obtain new enclosures for the zeros of Bessel functions and their derivatives in terms of inverse values of some elementary functions. These bounds are valid, with a few exceptions, for all zeros and all Bessel functions with non-negative indices. We provide numerical evidence showing that our bounds either improve or closely match the best previously known ones.
We prove an analogue of Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of the magnetic Schrödinger operator with Aharonov--Bohm potential on the disk, for Dirichlet and magnetic Neumann boundary conditions. This answers a question posed by R. L. Frank and A. M. Hansson in 2008.
An example of Cornalba and Shiffman from 1972 disproves in dimension two or higher a classical prediction that the count of zeros of holomorphic self-mappings of the complex linear space should be controlled by the maximum modulus function. We prove that such a bound holds for a modified coarse count inspired by the theory of persistence modules originating in topological data analysis.
Consider a Dirac operator on an oriented compact surface endowed with a Riemannian metric and spin structure. Provided the area and the conformal class are fixed, how small can the $k$-th positive Dirac eigenvalue be? This problem mirrors the maximization problem for the eigenvalues of the Laplacian, which is related to the study of harmonic maps into spheres. We uncover the connection between the critical metrics for Dirac eigenvalues and harmonic maps into complex projective spaces. Using this approach we show that for many conformal classes on a torus the first nonzero Dirac eigenvalue is minimised by the flat metric. We also present a new geometric proof of Bär's theorem stating that the first nonzero Dirac eigenvalue on the sphere is minimised by the standard round metric.
The celebrated Pólya's conjecture (1954) in spectral geometry states that the eigenvalue counting functions of the Dirichlet and Neumann Laplacian on a bounded Euclidean domain can be estimated from above and below, respectively, by the leading term of Weyl's asymptotics. Pólya's conjecture is known to be true for domains which tile Euclidean space, and, in addition, for some special domains in higher dimensions. In this paper, we prove Pólya's conjecture for the disk, making it the first non-tiling planar domain for which the conjecture is verified. We also confirm Pólya's conjecture for arbitrary planar sectors, and, in the Dirichlet case, for balls of any dimension. Along the way, we develop the known links between the spectral problems in the disk and certain lattice counting problems. A key novel ingredient is the observation, made in recent work of the last named author, that the corresponding eigenvalue and lattice counting functions are related not only asymptotically, but in fact satisfy certain uniform bounds. Our proofs are purely analytic, except for a rigorous computer-assisted argument needed to cover the short interval of values of the spectral parameter in the case of the Neumann problem in the disk.
Courant's theorem implies that the number of nodal domains of a Laplace eigenfunction is controlled by the corresponding eigenvalue. Over the years, there have been various attempts to find an appropriate generalization of this statement in different directions. We propose a new take on this problem using ideas from topological data analysis. We show that if one counts the nodal domains in a coarse way, basically ignoring small oscillations, Courant's theorem extends to linear combinations of eigenfunctions, to their products, to other operators, and to higher topological invariants of nodal sets. We also obtain a coarse version of the Bézout estimate for common zeros of linear combinations of eigenfunctions. We show that our results are essentially sharp and that the coarse count is necessary, since these extensions fail in general for the standard count. Our approach combines multiscale polynomial approximation in Sobolev spaces with new results in the theory of persistence modules and barcodes.
We obtain asymptotic formulae for the Steklov eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of curvilinear polygons in terms of their side lengths and angles. These formulae are quite precise: the errors tend to zero as the spectral parameter tends to infinity. The Steklov problem on planar domains with corners is closely linked to the classical sloshing and sloping beach problems in hydrodynamics; as we show it is also related to quantum graphs. Somewhat surprisingly, the arithmetic properties of the angles of a curvilinear polygon have a significant effect on the boundary behaviour of the Steklov eigenfunctions. Our proofs are based on an explicit construction of quasimodes. We use a variety of methods, including ideas from spectral geometry, layer potential analysis, and some new techniques tailored to our problem.
The validity of Weyl's law for the Steklov problem on domains with Lipschitz boundaries is a well-known open question in spectral geometry. We answer this question in two dimensions and show that Weyl's law holds for an even larger class of surfaces with rough boundaries. This class includes domains with interior cusps as well as 'slow' exterior cusps. Moreover, the condition on the speed of exterior cusps cannot be improved, which makes our result in a sense optimal. The proof is based on the methods of Suslina and Agranovich combined with some observations about the boundary behaviour of conformal mappings.
How close is the Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) map to the square root of the corresponding boundary Laplacian? This question has been actively investigated in recent years. Somewhat surprisingly, a lot of techniques involved can be traced back to a newly rediscovered manuscript of Hörmander from the 1950s. We present Hörmander's approach and its applications, with an emphasis on eigenvalue estimates and spectral asymptotics. In particular, we obtain results for the DtN maps on non-smooth boundaries in the Riemannian setting, the DtN operators for the Helmholtz equation and the DtN operators on differential forms.