Compact manifolds with fixed boundary and large Steklov eigenvalues

Abstract: Let M be a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. Let b>0 be the number of connected components of its boundary. For manifolds of dimension at least 3, we prove that it is possible to obtain an arbitrarily large (b+1)-th Steklov eigenvalue using a smooth conformal perturbation which is supported in a thin neighbourhood of the boundary, identically equal to 1 on the boundary. For j<b+1, it is also possible to obtain arbitrarily large j-th eigenvalue, but this require the conformal factor to spread throughout the interior of the manifold M. This is in stark contrast with the situation for the eigenvalues of the Laplace operator on a closed manifold, where a conformal factor that is large enough for the volume to become unbounded results in the spectrum collapsing to 0. We also prove that it is possible to obtain large Steklov eigenvalues while keeping different boundary components arbitrarily close to each other, by constructing a convenient Riemannian submersion.