Second Variation Formula for the Laplace Eigenvalue Functional on Closed Manifolds

Abstract

For a closed Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ of dimension $n$, let $\lambda_{1}(g)$ be the first positive eigenvalue of the Laplace--Beltrami operator $\Delta_{g}$ and $\mbox{Vol}(M,g)$ the volume of $(M, g)$. Considering the scale-invariant quantity $\lambda_{k}(g)\mbox{Vol}(M,g)^{2/n}$ as a functional over all the metrics in a fixed conformal class, we derive a second variation formula for the functional. As a corollary, we prove that if the canonical flat metric on a torus is such that the multiplicity of $\lambda_{1}$ is two, then the flat metric is not a maximal point of the functional in its conformal class. This is a higher dimensional extension of Karpukhin's very recent work.