  The paper deals with the genericity of domain-dependent spectral properties
of the Laplacian-Dirichlet operator. In particular we prove that, generically,
the squares of the eigenfunctions form a free family. We also show that the
spectrum is generically non-resonant. The results are obtained by applying
global perturbations of the domains and exploiting analytic perturbation
properties. The work is motivated by two applications: an existence result for
the problem of maximizing the rate of exponential decay of a damped membrane
and an approximate controllability result for the bilinear Schr\"odinger
equation.
