In this paper we prove that the second (non-trivial) Neumann eigenvalue of the Laplace operator on smooth domains of RN with prescribed measure m attains its maximum on the union of two disjoint balls of measure m/2. As a consequence, the Pólya conjecture for the Neumann eigenvalues holds for the second eigenvalue and for arbitrary domains. We moreover prove that a relaxed form of the same inequality holds in the context of non-smooth domains and densities.

In this paper we prove global regularity for the full water-wave system in three dimensions for small data, under the influence of both gravity and surface tension. This problem presents essential difficulties which were absent in all of the earlier global regularity results for other water-wave models. To construct global solutions, we use a combination of energy estimates and matching dispersive estimates. There is a significant new difficulty in proving energy estimates in our problem, namely the combination of slow pointwise decay of solutions (no better than |t|−5/6) and the presence of a large, codimension-1, set of quadratic time-resonances. To deal with such a situation, we propose here a new mechanism, which exploits a non-degeneracy property of the time-resonant hypersurfaces and some special structure of the quadratic part of the non-linearity, connected to the conserved energy of the system. The dispersive estimates rely on analysis of the Duhamel formula in the Fourier space. The main contributions come from the set of space-time resonances, which is a large set of dimension 1. To control the corresponding bilinear interactions, we use harmonic analysis techniques, such as orthogonality arguments in the Fourier space and atomic decompositions of functions. Most importantly, we construct and use a refined norm which is well adapted to the geometry of the problem.

In this paper, we initiate the study of the instability of naked singularities without symmetries. In a series of papers, Christodoulou proved that naked singularities are not stable in the context of the spherically symmetric Einstein equations coupled with a massless scalar field. We study in this paper the next simplest case: a characteristic initial value problem of this coupled system with the initial data given on two intersecting null cones, the incoming one of which is assumed to be spherically symmetric and singular at its vertex, and the outgoing one of which has no symmetries. It is shown that, arbitrarily fixing the initial scalar field, the set of the initial conformal metrics on the outgoing null cone such that the maximal future development does not have any sequences of closed trapped surfaces approaching the singularity, is of first category in the whole space in which the shear tensors are continuous. Such a set can then be viewed as exceptional, although the exceptionality is weaker than the at least 1 co-dimensionality in spherical symmetry. Almost equivalently, it is also proved that, arbitrarily fixing an incoming null cone C––ε to the future of the initial incoming null cone, the set of the initial conformal metrics such that the maximal future development has at least one closed trapped surface before C––ε, contains an open and dense subset of the whole space. Since the initial scalar field can be chosen such that the singularity is naked if the initial shear is set to be zero, we may say that the spherical naked singularities of a self-gravitating scalar field are not stable under gravitational perturbations. This in particular gives new families of non-spherically symmetric gravitational perturbations different from the original spherically symmetric scalar perturbations given by Christodoulou.

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We obtain the existence and uniqueness of solutions for a class of retarded parabolic equations with superlinear perturbations. The asymptotic behavior result is studied by using the pullback attractor framework.