Rigidity of surfaces with nonpositive Euler characteristic by the second eigenvalue of the Jacobi operator

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the spectral properties of the Jacobi operator for immersed surfaces with nonpositive Euler characteristic, extending previous results in the field. We first prove a sharp upper bound for the second eigenvalue of the Jacobi operator for compact surfaces with nonpositive Euler characteristic that are fully immersed in the Euclidean sphere, and then we classify all such surfaces attaining this upper bound. Furthermore, we demonstrate that totally geodesic tori maximize the second eigenvalue among all compact orientable surfaces with positive genus in the product space $\mathbb{S}^1(r) \times \mathbb{S}^2(s)$.