The polymath blog

This post is the new research thread for the Polymath7 project to solve the hot spots conjecture for acute-angled triangles, superseding the previous thread; this project had experienced a period of low activity for many months, but has recently picked up again, due both to renewed discussion of the numerical approach to the problem, and also some theoretical advances due to Miyamoto and Siudeja.

On the numerical side, we have decided to focus first on the problem of obtaining validated upper and lower bounds for the second Neumann eigenvalue of a triangle . Good upper bounds are relatively easy to obtain, simply by computing the Rayleigh quotient of numerically obtained approximate eigenfunctions, but lower bounds are trickier. This paper of Liu and Oshii has some promising approaches.

After we get good bounds on the eigenvalue, the next step is to get good control on the eigenfunction; some approaches are summarised in this note of Lior Silberman, mainly based on gluing together exact solutions to the eigenfunction equation in various sectors or disks. Some recent papers of Kwasnicki-Kulczycki, Melenk-Babuska, and Driscoll employ similar methods and may be worth studying further. However, in view of the theoretical advances, the precise control on the eigenfunction that we need may be different from what we had previously been contemplating.

These two papers of Miyamoto introduced a promising new method to theoretically control the behaviour of the second Neumann eigenfunction , by taking linear combinations of that eigenfunction with other, more explicit, solutions to the eigenfunction equation , restricting that combination to nodal domains, and then computing the Dirichlet energy on each domain. Among other things, these methods can be used to exclude critical points occurring anywhere in the interior or on the edges of the triangle except for those points that are close to one of the vertices; and in this recent preprint of Siudeja, two further partial results on the hot spots conjecture are obtained by a variant of the method:

• The hot spots conjecture is established unconditionally for any acute-angled triangle which has one angle less than or equal to (actually a slightly larger region than this is obtained). In particular, the case of very narrow triangles have been resolved (the dark green region in the area below).
• The hot spots conjecture is also established for any acute-angled triangle with the property that the second eigenfunction has no critical points on two of the three edges (excluding vertices).

So if we can develop more techniques to rule out critical points occuring on edges (i.e. to keep eigenfunctions monotone on the edges on which they change sign), we may be able to establish the hot spots conjecture for a further range of triangles. In particular, some hybrid of the Miyamoto method and the numerical techniques we are beginning to discuss may be a promising approach to fully resolve the conjecture. (For instance, the Miyamoto method relies on upper bounds on , and these can be obtained numerically.)

The arguments of Miyamoto also allow one to rule out critical points occuring for most of the interior points of a given triangle; it is only the points that are very close to one of the three vertices which we cannot yet rule out by Miyamoto’s methods. (But perhaps they can be ruled out by the numerical methods we are also developing, thus giving a hybrid solution to the conjecture.)

Below the fold I’ll describe some of the theoretical tools used in the above arguments.

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