Sharp bounds for the first eigenvalue of symmetric Markov processes and their applications

By adopting a nice auxiliary transform of Markov operators, we derive new bounds for the first eigenvalue of the generator corresponding to symmetric Markov processes. Our results not only extend the related topic in the literature, but also are efficiently used to study the first eigenvalue of birth-death processes with killing and that of elliptic operators with killing on half line. In particular, we obtain two approximation procedures for the first eigenvalue of birth-death processes with killing, and present qualitatively sharp upper and lower bounds for the first eigenvalue of elliptic operators with killing on half line.