Enumerating spanning trees of graphs with an involution

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Abstract

As the extension of the previous work by Ciucu and the present authors [M. Ciucu, W.G. Yan, F.J. Zhang, The number of spanning trees of plane graphs with reflective symmetry, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 112 (2005) 105–116], this paper considers the problem of enumeration of spanning trees of weighted graphs with an involution which allows fixed points. We show that if G is a weighted graph with an involution, then the sum of weights of spanning trees of G can be expressed in terms of the product of the sums of weights of spanning trees of two weighted graphs with a smaller size determined by the involution of G. As applications, we enumerate spanning trees of the almost-complete bipartite graph, the almost-complete graph, the Möbius ladder, and the almost-join of two copies of a graph.

Keywords

Involution
Spanning tree
Laplacian matrix
Matrix-Tree Theorem
Laplacian eigenvalue

Cited by (0)

1

Supported in part by NSFC Grant #10831001.

2

Supported in part by NSFC Grant #10771086 and by Program for New Century Excellent Talents in Fujian Province University.