Kohler-Jobin meets Ehrhard: The sharp lower bound for the Gaussian principal frequency while the Gaussian torsional rigidity is fixed, via rearrangements

In this note, we provide an adaptation of the Kohler-Jobin rearrangement technique to the setting of the Gauss space. As a result, we prove the Gaussian analogue of the Kohler-Jobin resolution of a conjecture of Pólya-Szegö: when the Gaussian torsional rigidity of a domain is fixed, the Gaussian principal frequency is minimized for the half-space. At the core of this rearrangement technique is the idea of considering a “modified” torsional rigidity, with respect to a given function, and rearranging its layers to half-spaces, in a particular way; the Rayleigh quotient decreases with this procedure.

We emphasize that the analogy of the Gaussian case with the Lebesgue case is not to be expected here, as in addition to some soft symmetrization ideas, the argument relies on the properties of some special functions; the fact that this analogy does hold is somewhat of a miracle.