Optimal Szegő-Weinberger type inequalities (Q906794)

The basic isoperimetric result on vibrating membranes with fixed boundary is that of Rayleigh, Faber and Krahn, which says, that among all membranes of a given area, the circle has the lowest first eigenvalue. The corresponding theorem for the free membrane problem or the Neumann eigenvalue problem goes back to \textit{E. T. Kornhauser} and \textit{I. Stakgold} [J. Math. Phys., Mass. Inst. Techn. 31, 45--54 (1952; Zbl 0046.32303)]: Among all membranes of a given area the circle has the maximum of the first nontrivial Neumann eigenvalue. The aim of this paper is a generalization of the theorem of Kornhauser and Stakgold to bounded and symmetric domains in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) with fixed \(e^{h(x)}dx-\)measure. The main result is the following: Let \(\mu_1\) be the first nontrivial eigenvalue of the Neumann problem \[ \begin{aligned} -\operatorname{div}(e^{(h(x))} \nabla u ) & = \mu e^{h(|x|)} u \text{ in } \Omega \\ \frac{\partial u }{\partial \nu } & = 0 \text{ on } \partial \Omega\end{aligned} \] then the ball centered at the origin is the unique set maximizing \(\mu_1\) among all Lipschitz bounded and symmetric about the origin domains \(\Omega\) of \(\mathbb{R}^n\) of prescribed \(e^{h(x)}dx\)-measure. The first part of the paper deals with the problem in dimension one. As a model case the authors choose \(h(|x|) = |x|^2 \). The proof based on rearrangement techniques and symmetrization arguments. By \textit{F. Chiacchio} and \textit{G. Di Blasio} [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré, Anal. Non Linéaire 29, No. 2, 199--216 (2012; Zbl 1238.35072)] the case \(h(x) = e^{-|x|^2/2} \) is proven with a different method.