Geometric estimates on weighted p-fundamental tone and applications to the first eigenvalue of submanifolds with bounded mean curvature

This paper generalizes to the context of smooth metric measure spaces and submanifolds with negative sectional curvatures some well-known geometric estimates on the p-fundamental tone by using vector fields satisfying a positive divergence condition. Choosing the vector field to be the gradient of an appropriately chosen distance function yields generalised McKean estimates whilst other choices of vector fields yield new geometric estimates generalising certain results of Lima et al. (Nonlinear Anal. 2010;72:771–781). We also obtain a lower bound on the spectrum of the weighted p-Laplacian on a complete noncompact smooth metric space with the underlying space being a submanifold with bounded mean curvature in the hyperbolic space form of constant negative sectional curvature generalising results of Du and Mao (J Math Anal Appl. 2017;456:787–795).