Spectral extremal results on trees

Longfei Fang ; Huiqiu Lin ; Jinlong Shu ; Zhiyuan Zhang

The electronic journal of combinatorics, Tome 31 (2024) no. 2

Résumé

Let ${\rm spex}(n,F)$ be the maximum spectral radius over all $F$-free graphs of order $n$, and ${\rm SPEX}(n,F)$ be the family of $F$-free graphs of order $n$ with spectral radius equal to ${\rm spex}(n,F)$. Given integers $n,k,p$ with $n>k>0$ and $0\leq p\leq \lfloor(n-k)/2\rfloor$, let $S_{n,k}^{p}$ be the graph obtained from $K_k\nabla(n-k)K_1$ by embedding $p$ independent edges within its independent set, where '$\nabla$' means the join product. For $n\geq\ell\geq 4$, let $G_{n,\ell}=S_{n,(\ell-2)/2}^{0}$ if $\ell$ is even, and $G_{n,\ell}=S_{n,(\ell-3)/2}^{1}$ if $\ell$ is odd. Cioabă, Desai and Tait [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 37 (3) (2023) 2228-2239] showed that for $\ell\geq 6$ and sufficiently large $n$, if $\rho(G)\geq \rho(G_{n,\ell})$, then $G$ contains all trees of order $\ell$ unless $G=G_{n,\ell}$. They further posed a problem to study ${\rm spex}(n,F)$ for various specific trees $F$. Fix a tree $F$ of order $\ell\geq 6$, let $A$ and $B$ be two partite sets of $F$ with $|A|\leq |B|$, and set $q=|A|-1$. We first show that any graph in ${\rm SPEX}(n,F)$ contains a spanning subgraph $K_{q,n-q}$ for $q\geq 1$ and sufficiently large $n$. Consequently, $\rho(K_{q,n-q})\leq {\rm spex}(n,F)\leq \rho(G_{n,\ell})$, we further respectively characterize all trees $F$ with these two equalities holding. Secondly, we characterize the spectral extremal graphs for some specific trees and provide asymptotic spectral extremal values of the remaining trees. In particular, we characterize the spectral extremal graphs for all spiders, surprisingly, the extremal graphs are not always the spanning subgraph of $G_{n,\ell}$.

Détail

DOI : 10.37236/12726

Classification : 05C50, 05C05, 05C35
Mots-clés : Turán-type problem, Brualdi-Solheid problem, spectral radius