Mirror coupling of reflecting Brownian motion and an application to Chavel's conjecture

Abstract

In a series of papers, Burdzy et. al. introduced the \emph{mirror coupling} of reflecting Brownian motions in a smooth bounded domain $D\subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$, and used it to prove certain properties of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Neumann Laplaceian on $D$. In the present paper we show that the construction of the mirror coupling can be extended to the case when the two Brownian motions live in different domains $D_{1},D_{2}\subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$. As an application of the construction, we derive a unifying proof of the two main results concerning the validity of Chavel's conjecture on the domain monotonicity of the Neumann heat kernel, due to I. Chavel (\cite{Chavel}), respectively W. S. Kendall (\cite{Kendall}).