The first Steklov eigenvalue, conformal geometry, and minimal surfaces

We consider the relationship of the geometry of compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary to the first nonzero eigenvalue sigma_1 of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map (Steklov eigenvalue). For surfaces Sigma with genus gamma and k boundary components we obtain the upper bound sigma_1L(\partial \Sigma) \leq 2(2gamma+k)\pi. We attempt to find the best constant in this inequality for annular surfaces (gamma=0 and k=2). For rotationally symmetric metrics we show that the best constant is achieved by the induced metric on the portion of the catenoid centered at the origin which meets a sphere orthogonally and hence is a solution of the free boundary problem for the area functional in the ball. For a general class of (not necessarily rotationally symmetric) metrics on the annulus, which we call supercritical, we prove that $\sigma_1(\sig)L(\p\Sigma)$ is dominated by that of the critical catenoid with equality if and only if the annulus is conformally equivalent to the critical catenoid by a conformal transformation which is an isometry on the boundary. We prove general upper bounds for conformal metrics on manifolds of any dimension which can be properly conformally immersed into the unit ball in terms of certain conformal volume quantities. We show that these bounds are only achieved when the manifold is minimally immersed by first Steklov eigenfunctions. We also use these ideas to show that any free boundary solution in two dimensions has area at least \pi.