Absence of Critical Mass Densities for a Vibrating Membrane

We study the dependence of the eigenvalues of a N-dimensional vibrating membrane upon variation of the mass density. We prove that the elementary symmetric functions of the eigenvalues depend real-analytically on the mass density and that such functions have no critical points with constant mass constraint. In particular, the elementary symmetric functions of the eigenvalues, hence all simple eigenvalues, have no local maxima or minima on the set of those mass densities with a prescribed total mass.