To 1/2-logconcavity and beyond: Geometric properties of Dirichlet eigenfunctions

We prove that, on a bounded open convex domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^n$, the first Dirichlet eigenfunction of the Laplacian or the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck operator is $\alpha$-logconcave for every $\alpha\in(0,1/2]$. This extends the recent $1/2$-logconcavity theorem of Crasta--Fragal\`{a} for the Laplacian to the weighted Gaussian setting and, simultaneously, to a broader range of exponents. More precisely, if $u$ denotes the first eigenfunction normalized by $\|u\|_\infty=1$, then for every $\alpha\in(0,1/2]$, the function $-\bigl(-\log(\kappa u(x))\bigr)^{\alpha}$ is concave in $\Omega$ provided the scaling parameter $\kappa$ lies below an explicit threshold $\kappa_\alpha(\Omega)\in(0,1)$, which depends on the first Dirichlet eigenvalue and on the diameter of~$\Omega$. For the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck operator, $\kappa_\alpha(\Omega)$ also depends on the distance between $\Omega$ and the origin. Moreover, we establish a local counterpart: for every $\kappa\in(0,1)$, the function $\bigl(-\log(\kappa u)\bigr)^{\alpha}$ is convex on a convex neighborhood $\Omega_\kappa$ of the unique maximum point of~$u$. We also provide counterexamples showing that unscaled $1/2$-logconcavity may fail for the first Dirichlet eigenfunction of a Schr\"odinger operator with a smooth convex potential, and for the first Dirichlet eigenfunction of a weighted Laplacian associated with an affine log-concave weight.