Isoperimetric inequalities and the gap between the first and second eigenvalues of an euclidean domain

In this paper we introduce a weighted Cheeger constant and show that the gap between the first two eigenvalues of a Riemannian manifold given Dirichlet conditions can be bounded from below in terms of this constant. When the Riemannian manifold is a bounded Euclidean domain satisfying an interior rolling sphere condition we give an estimate on the weighted Cheeger constant in terms of the rolling sphere radius, volume, a bound on the principal curvatures of the boundary and the dimension. This yields a lower bound on the nontrivial gap for Euclidean domains. © 1997 The Journal of Geometric Analysis