No abstract

Otsuki tori form a countable family of immersed minimal two-dimensional tori in the unitary three-dimensional sphere. According to El Soufi-Ilias theorem, the metrics on the Otsuki tori are extremal for some unknown eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Despite the fact that the Otsuki tori are defined in quite an implicit way, we find explicitly the numbers of the corresponding extremal eigenvalues. In particular we provide an extremal metric for the third eigenvalue of the torus.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure. v.2: minor corrections v.3: references are updated. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1009.028

Abstract. Using Takahashi theorem we propose an approach to extend known families of minimal tori in spheres. As an example, the well-known twoparametric family of Lawson tau-surfaces including tori and Klein bottles is extended to a three-parametric family of tori and Klein bottles minimally immersed in spheres. Extremal spectral properties of the metrics on these surfaces are investigated. These metrics include i) both metrics extremal for the first non-trivial eigenvalue on the torus, i.e. the metric on the Clifford torus and the metric on the equilateral torus and ii) the metric maximal for the first non-trivial eigenvalue on the Klein bottle.

We show that for any positive integer k, the k-th nonzero eigenvalue of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the two-dimensional sphere endowed with a Riemannian metric of unit area, is maximized in the limit by a sequence of metrics converging to a union of k touching identical round spheres. This proves a conjecture posed by the second author in 2002 and yields a sharp isoperimetric inequality for all nonzero eigenvalues of the Laplacian on a sphere. Earlier, the result was known only for k = 1 (