Fundamental tones of clamped plates in nonpositively curved spaces

Abstract

We study Lord Rayleigh's problem for clamped plates on an arbitrary $n$-dimensional $(n\ge 2)$ Cartan-Hadamard manifold $(M,g)$ with sectional curvature $\text{K}\le -{\kappa }^2$ for some $\kappa \ge 0.$ We first prove a McKean-type spectral gap estimate, i.e. the fundamental tone of any domain in $(M,g)$ is universally bounded from below by $\frac{(n-1{)}^4}{16}{\kappa }^4$ whenever the $\kappa$-Cartan-Hadamard conjecture holds on $(M,g)$, e.g. in 2- and 3-dimensions due to Bol (1941) and Kleiner (1992), respectively. In 2- and 3-dimensions we prove sharp isoperimetric inequalities for sufficiently small clamped plates, i.e. the fundamental tone of any domain in $(M,g)$ of volume $v>0$ is not less than the corresponding fundamental tone of a geodesic ball of the same volume $v$ in the space of constant curvature $-{\kappa }^2$ provided that $v\le c_n/{\kappa }^n$ with $c_2\approx 21.031$ and $c_3\approx 1.721$, respectively. In particular, Rayleigh's problem in Euclidean spaces resolved by Nadirashvili (1992) and Ashbaugh and Benguria (1995) appears as a limiting case in our setting (i.e. $\text{K}\equiv \kappa =0$). The sharpness of our results requires the validity of the $\kappa$-Cartan-Hadamard conjecture (i.e. sharp isoperimetric inequality on $(M,g)$) and peculiar properties of the Gaussian hypergeometric function, both valid only in dimensions 2 and 3; nevertheless, some nonoptimal estimates of the fundamental tone of arbitrary clamped plates are also provided in high-dimensions. As an application, by using the sharp isoperimetric inequality for small clamped hyperbolic discs, we give necessarily and sufficient conditions for the existence of a nontrivial solution to an elliptic PDE involving the biharmonic Laplace-Beltrami operator.

28 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. To appear in Advances in Mathematics