THE BILAPLACIAN WITH ROBIN BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

We introduce Robin boundary conditions for biharmonic operators, which are a model for elastically supported plates and are closely related to the study of spaces of traces of Sobolev functions. We study the dependence of the operator, its eigenvalues, and eigenfunctions on the Robin parameters. We show in particular that when the parameters go to plus infinity the Robin problem converges to other biharmonic problems, and we obtain estimates on the rate of divergence when the parameters go to minus infinity. We also analyze the dependence of the operator on smooth perturbations of the domain, computing the shape derivatives of the eigenvalues and giving a characterization for critical domains under volume and perimeter constraints. We include a number of open problems arising in the context of our results.