Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2013
In this paper, we give lower bounds for the fundamental tone of open sets in minimal submanifolds immersed into warped product spaces of type Nn ×f Qq, where f ∈ C∞(N). This setting allows us to deal, among other things, with minimal submanifolds bounded by cylinders, cones, spheres and pseudo-hyperbolic spaces where most of these examples are not covered in the literature. Applications also include the study of the essential spectrum of hyperbolic graphs over compact regions of the boundary at infinity.