Abstract
We extend the study of orientable hypersurfaces in a Sasakian manifold initiated by Watanabe. The Reeb vector field xi of the Sasakian manifold induces a vector field xi(T) on the hypersurface, namely the tangential component of xi to hypersurface, and it also gives a smooth function rho on the hypersurface, which is the projection of the Reeb vector field on the unit normal. First, we find volume estimates for a compact orientable hypersurface and then we use them to find an upper bound of the first nonzero eigenvalue of the Laplace operator on the hypersurface, showing that if the equality holds then the hypersurface is isometric to a certain sphere. Also, we use a bound on the energy of the vector field del rho on a compact orientable hypersurface in a Sasakian manifold in order to find another geometric condition (in terms of mean curvature and integral curves of xi(T)) under which the hypersurface is isometric to a sphere. Finally, we study compact orientable hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature in a Sasakian manifold and find a sharp upper bound on the first nonzero eigenvalue of the Laplace operator on the hypersurface. In particular, we show that this upper bound is attained if and only if the hypersurface is isometric to a sphere, provided that the Ricci curvature of the hypersurface along del rho has a certain lower bound.