Upper bound for the second eigenvalue of a Schrödinger operator on a compact manifold and applications (Q1188096)

The authors study some spectral properties of the Schrödinger operators defined on a compact Riemannian manifold. In the first part of the paper they obtain an optimal upper bound for the second eigenvalue of Schrödinger operators using a conformal invariant, which was introduced by Li and Yau around 1982. In the second part the authors obtain some applications of the above estimate in the study of minimal hypersurfaces. Finally, in the last part they deal with some isospectrality problems.