Some recent developments on the Steklov eigenvalue problem (Q6190462)

This is a beautiful survey article about the Steklov eigenvalue problem on Riemannian manifolds. It is specially adequate for those people interested on researching in such area. Let \(\Omega\) be smooth compact Riemannian manifold with non-empty boundary \(\Sigma:=\partial \Omega\). The Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator \(\mathcal D:C^\infty(\Sigma)\to C^\infty(\Sigma)\) is defined by \(\mathcal D f=\partial_\nu \widehat f\), where \(\nu\) is the outward normal along the boundary \(\Sigma\) and where the function \(\widehat f\in C^\infty(\Omega)\) is the unique harmonic extension of \(f\) to the interior of \(\Omega\). The eigenvalues of \(\mathcal D\) are known as \textbf{Steklov eigenvalues} of \(\Omega\). The eigenfunctions of \(\mathcal D\) form an orthonormal basis of \(L^2(\Sigma)\). If \(\mathcal D f=\sigma f\), the harmonic extension \(u\) of \(f\) is a solution of the Steklov spectral problem: \[ \begin{cases} \Delta u=0&\text{in }\Omega,\\ \partial_\nu u=\sigma u & \text{on }\Sigma. \end{cases} \] The function \(u\) is a \textbf{Steklov eigenfunction} of \(\Omega\), while the collection of eigenvalues is called the \textbf{Steklov spectrum} of \(\Omega\). The interest of the authors is to understand the rich interplay between the Steklov spectral data and various geometric features of the Riemannian manifold \(\Omega\). (This paragraph was essentially extracted from the introductory section in the article.) This problem has attracted a lot of attention in the recent years. The article under review focuses on those recent developments not covered in the previous survey article [\textit{A. Girouard} and \textit{I. Polterovich}, J. Spectr. Theory 7, No. 2, 321--359 (2017; Zbl 1378.58026)] and included in the research expertise of the authors. However, Section 2 introduces readers to the subject with motivating and basis examples as well as classical results. The first part (Secs.\ 3--5) considers problems related to isoperimetric-type geometric inequalities, for instance, to obtain upper bounds for the first perimeter-normalized Steklov eigenvalues \(\sigma_1(\Omega)L(\Sigma)\) of compact Riemannian surfaces in terms of the genus and number of boundary components of \(\Omega\). Section 6 deals with discretization of manifolds into graphs to obtain bounds on the Steklov eigenvalues. Questions from Inverse Spectral Geometry are studied in Section 7--9. The general aim is to understand in what extent the Steklov spectrum encodes the geometry of the Riemannian manifold (or orbifold) \(\Omega\). Both, positive and negative results are discussed. Positive results are those that finds geometric information recovered from the Steklov spectrum. A negative result proves that some geometric property is not determined by the Steklov spectrum, usually finding a Steklov isospectral pair with only one of them having such property. Section 10 deals with the geometry of Steklov eigenfunctions, including bounds for the volume of nodal sets. As the icing on the cake of this nice and useful monograph, the several open problems scattered in the particular sections are conveniently listed in Appendix B along with a reference to their original location.