Nodal sets of thin curved layers

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the location of nodal sets of eigenfunctions of the Dirichlet Laplacian in thin tubular neighbourhoods of hypersurfaces of the Euclidean space of arbitrary dimension. In the limit when the radius of the neighbourhood tends to zero, it is known that spectral properties of the Laplacian are approximated well by an effective Schr\"odinger operator on the hypersurface with a potential expressed solely in terms of principal curvatures. By applying techniques of elliptic partial differential equations, we strengthen the known perturbation results to get a convergence of eigenfunctions in H\"older spaces. This enables us in particular to conclude that every nodal set has a non-empty intersection with the boundary of the tubular neighbourhood.