A Faber–Krahn Inequality for Solutions of Schrödinger’s Equation on Riemannian Manifolds

We consider a bounded open set with smooth boundary \(\Omega \subset M\) in a Riemannian manifold (M, g), and suppose that there exists a non-trivial function \(u\in C({\overline{\Omega }})\) solving the problem $$\begin{aligned} -\Delta u=V(x)u, \,\, \text{ in }\,\,\Omega , \end{aligned}$$ in the distributional sense, with \(V\in L^\infty (\Omega )\), where \(u\equiv 0\) on \(\partial \Omega .\) We prove a sharp inequality involving \(||V||_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )}\) and the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian on geodesic balls in simply connected spaces with constant curvature, which slightly generalises the well-known Faber–Krahn isoperimetric inequality. Moreover, in a Riemannian manifold which is not necessarily simply connected, we obtain a lower bound for \(||V||_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )}\) in terms of its isoperimetric or Cheeger constant. As an application, we show that if \(\Omega \) is a domain on a m-dimensional minimal submanifold of \({\mathbb {R}}^n\) which lies in a ball of radius R, then $$\begin{aligned} ||V||_{L^{\infty }(\Omega )}\ge \left( \frac{m}{2R}\right) ^{2}. \end{aligned}$$