On the spectral gap for compact manifolds (Q811591)

The aim of the paper is to give lower bounds for the first eigenvalue of the Laplace operator on a compact Riemannian manifold in terms of a lower bound for the Ricci curvature and an upper bound for the diameter of the manifold. The proof is based on gradient estimates which are obtained by an application of the maximum principle technique to \(|\nabla\phi|^ 2-G(\phi)\) for an eigenfunction \(\phi\) and appropriate auxiliary functions \(G\). The auxiliary functions are chosen in such a way that the above quantity vanishes identically if \(\phi\) is replaced by an eigenfunction of an appropriate Neumann boundary problem. Using these examples, it can be shown that the estimates are sharp in the sense that they cannot be improved if no additional informations on the manifold are given. In particular, the given eigenvalue estimates improve corresponding results by Berard, Besson, Gallot and by Zhong and Yang.