The first Dirichlet eigenvalue and the width

Abstract

For a geodesic ball with non-negative Ricci curvature and mean convex boundary, it is known that the first Dirichlet eigenvalue of this geodesic ball has a sharp lower bound in term of its radius. We show a quantitative explicit inequality, which bounds the width of geodesic ball in terms of the spectral gap between the first Dirichlet eigenvalue and the corresponding sharp lower bound.

With an appendix by Zichang Liu, to appear in J. Funct. Anal