Second Laplacian eigenvalue on real projective space

Abstract

In this paper, we prove an upper bound on the second non-zero Laplacian eigenvalue on $n$-dimensional real projective space. The sharp result for 2-dimensions was shown by Nadirashvili and Penskoi and later by Karpukhin when the metric degenerates to that of the disjoint union of a round projective space and a sphere. That conjecture is open in higher dimensions, but this paper proves it up to a constant factor that tends to 1 as the dimension tends to infinity. Also, we introduce a topological argument that deals with the orthogonality conditions in a single step proof.