EIGENVALUES OF POLYHARMONIC OPERATORS ON VARIABLE DOMAINS

We consider a class of eigenvalue problems for polyharmonic operators, including Dirichlet and buckling-type eigenvalue problems. We prove an analyticity result for the dependence of the symmetric functions of the eigenvalues upon domain perturbations and compute Hadamard-type formulas for the Frechet differentials. We also consider isovolumetric domain perturbations and characterize the corresponding critical domains for the symmetric functions of the eigenvalues. Finally, we prove that balls are critical domains.