A steklov version of the torsional rigidity

Abstract

Motivated by the connection between the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet-Laplacian and the torsional rigidity, the aim of this paper is to find a physically coherent and mathematically interesting new concept for boundary torsional rigidity, closely related to the Steklov eigenvalue. From a variational point of view, such a new object corresponds to the sharp constant for the trace embedding of $W^{1,2}(\Omega)$ into $L^1(\partial\Omega)$. We obtain various equivalent variational formulations, present some properties of the state function and obtain some sharp geometric estimates, both for planar simply connected sets and for convex sets in any dimension.