Estimates on the lower bound of the first gap (Q947303)

The aim of this paper is the spectral gap of the first two eigenvalues of the fixed membrane of the Schrödinger operator on a bounded convex domain \(\Omega \) in \(\mathbb{R}^n\). The main result is the following Theorem. Let \(\lambda_1\) and \(\lambda_2\) be the first two Dirichlet eigenvalues of the Schrödinger operator \(-\Delta + V, \) this is \[ -\Delta u +Vu = \lambda u \text{ in } \Omega, u = 0 \text{ on } \partial \Omega, \] then \[ \lambda_2 - \lambda_1 \geq \frac{\pi^2}{d^2}+ 0.62 \alpha, \] where \(d\) is the diameter of the domain and \(\alpha > 0 \) is the global log-convexity and has to do with the first positive eigenfunction. The proof based on a maximum principle and the test function \(f_2/f_1\) with the second and first eigenfunction. There are a lot of results on this problem. Among others van den Berg conjectured motivated by statistical physics that \(\lambda_2 - \lambda_1 \geq 3\pi^2/d^2 .\)