Spectral radius and edge-disjoint spanning trees

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between spectral properties of graphs and their edge-disjoint spanning trees, providing new bounds and characterizations that advance understanding in spectral graph theory.

Contribution

It extends existing spectral bounds for spanning tree packings and confirms a conjecture on spectral radius maximization under degree and connectivity constraints.

Findings

Derived tight spectral radius conditions for spanning tree packings

Characterized extremal graphs with maximum spectral radius for given parameters

Confirmed a conjecture on spectral radius maximization with fixed degree and edge connectivity

Abstract

The spanning tree packing number of a graph $G$, denoted by $\tau(G)$, is the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees contained in $G$. The study of $\tau(G)$ is one of the classic problems in graph theory. Cioab\u{a} and Wong initiated to investigate $\tau(G)$ from spectral perspectives in 2012 and since then, $\tau(G)$ has been well studied using the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix in the past decade. In this paper, we further extend the results in terms of the number of edges and the spectral radius, respectively; and prove tight sufficient conditions to guarantee $\tau(G)\geq k$ with extremal graphs characterized. Moreover, we confirm a conjecture of Ning, Lu and Wang on characterizing graphs with the maximum spectral radius among all graphs with a given order as well as fixed minimum degree and fixed edge connectivity. Our results have important applications in rigidity and nowhere-zero flows. We conclude with some open problems in the end.