Géométrie nodale et valeurs propres de l’opérateur de Laplace et du p-laplacien
The main topic of the present thesis is spectral geometry. This area of mathematics is concerned with establishing links between the geometry of a Riemannian manifold and its spectrum. The spectrum of a closed Riemannian manifold M equipped with a Riemannian metric g associated with the Laplace-Beltrami operator is a sequence of non-negative numbers tending to infinity. The square root of any number of this sequence represents a frequency of vibration of the manifold.   This thesis consists of four articles all related to various aspects of spectral geometry. The first paper, “Superlevel sets and nodal extrema of Laplace eigenfunction”, is presented in Chapter 1. Nodal geometry of various elliptic operators, such as the Laplace-Beltrami operator, is studied. The goal of this paper is to generalize a result due to L. Polterovich and M. Sodin that gives a bound on the distribution of nodal extrema on a Riemann surface for a large class of functions, including eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. The proof given by L. Polterovich and M. Sodin is only valid for Riemann surfaces. Therefore, I present a different approach to the problem that works for eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary dimension.   The second and the third papers of this thesis are focused on a different elliptic operator, namely the p-Laplacian. This operator has the particularity of being non-linear. The article “Principal frequency of the p-Laplacian and the inradius of Euclidean domains” is presented in Chapter 2. It discusses lower bounds on the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet eigenvalue problem for the p-Laplace operator in terms of the inner radius of the domain. In particular, I show that if p is greater than the dimension, then it is possible to prove such lower bound without any hypothesis on the topology of the domain. Such bounds have previously been studied by well-known mathematicians, such as W. K. Haymann, E. Lieb, R. Banuelos, and T. Carroll. Their papers are mostly oriented toward the case of the usual Laplace operator. The generalization of such lower bounds for the p-Laplacian is done in my third paper, “Bounds on the Principal Frequency of the p-Laplacian”. It is presented in Chapter 3.  My fourth paper, “Wolf-Keller theorem of Neumann Eigenvalues”, is a joint work with Guillaume Roy-Fortin. This paper is concerned with the shape optimization problem in the case of the Laplace operator with Neumann boundary conditions. The main result of our paper is that eigenvalues of the Neumann boundary problem are not always maximized by disks among planar domains of given area. This joint work is presented in Chapter 4.
Laplace-Beltrami operator Nodal geometry Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions Eigenfunctions Eigenvalues Inradius Shape optimization