On the contact geometry of nodal sets

In the 3-dimensional Riemannian geometry, contact structures equipped with an adapted Riemannian metric are divergence-free, nondegenerate eigenforms of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. We trace out a 2-d analogue of this fact: there is a close relationship between the topology of the contact structure on a convex surface in the 3-manifold (the dividing curves) and the nodal curves of Laplacian eigenfunctions on that surface. Motivated by this relationship, we consider a topological version of Payne’s conjecture for the free membrane problem. We construct counterexamples to Payne’s conjecture for closed Riemannian surfaces. In light of the correspondence between the nodal lines and dividing curves, we interpret Payne’s conjecture in terms of the tight versus overtwisted dichotomy for contact structures.