Eigenvalue Estimates for Submanifolds with Locally Bounded Mean Curvature

We present a method to obtain lower bounds for firstDirichlet eigenvalue in terms of vector fields with positivedivergence. Applying this to the gradient of a distance functionwe obtain estimates of eigenvalue of balls inside the cut locus and of domains M B _N (p, r) in submanifolds M Nwith locally bounded mean curvature. Forsubmanifolds of Hadamard manifolds with bounded mean curvaturethese lower bounds depend only on the dimension of the submanifold and the bound on its mean curvature.