Bounds for the heat diffusion through windows of given area (Q1378632)

This is a very nice paper. The problem treated here involves finding estimates for the lowest eigenvalue for the Laplacian operator in a given bounded Lipschitz domain in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) subject to zero Dirichlet boundary conditions on part of the boundary (the window) and zero Neumann boundary conditions on the rest of the boundary. An illuminating model problem is dealt with explicitly. The analysis is based on Aronszajn-Weinstein variational methods and on bounds on the heat kernel. The author shows that a rigorous lower bound depends only on the size of the window but not on the geometry. He shows further that no nontrivial upper bound is possible in the sense that for any given window its geometry can be made bad enough to cause heat leakage rates arbitrarily close to ones having no insulation.