Pinching of the First Eigenvalue of the Laplacian and almost-Einstein Hypersurfaces of the Euclidean Space

18 pages, to appear in Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry.International audienceIn this paper, we prove new pinching theorems for the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian on compact hypersurfaces of the Euclidean space. These pinching results are associated with the upper bound for the first eigenvalue in terms of higher order mean curvatures. We show that under a suitable pinching condition, the hypersurface is diffeomorpic and almost isometric to a standard sphere. Moreover, as a corollary, we show that a hypersurface of the Euclidean space which is almost Einstein is diffeomorpic and almost isometric to a standard sphere