THE RANGE OF VALUES OF λ2/λ1 AND λ3/λ1 FOR THE FIXED MEMBRANE PROBLEM

We investigate the region of the plane in which the point (λ2/λ1, λ3/λ1) can lie, where λ1, λ2, and λ3 are the first three eigenvalues of the Dirichlet Laplacian on an arbitrary bounded domain Ω ⊂ ℝ2. In particular, by making use of a technique introduced by de Vries we obtain the best bounds to date for the quantities λ3/λ1 and (λ2 + λ3)/λ1. These bounds are λ3/λ1 ≤ 3.90514+ and (λ2 + λ3)/λ1 ≤ 5.52485+ and give small improvements over previous bounds of Marcellini. Where Marcellini used a bound due to Brands in his argument we use a better version of this bound which we obtain by incorporating deVries' idea. The other bounds that yield the greatest information about the region where points (λ2/λ1, λ3/λ1) can (possibly) lie are those due to Marcellini, Hile and Protter, and us (of which there are several, with two of them being new with this paper).