A combinatorial Laplacian with vertex weights

Abstract

One of the classical results in graph theory is the matrix-tree theorem which asserts that the determinant of a cofactor of the combinatorial Laplacian is equal to the number of spanning trees in a graph (see [1, 17, 11, 15]). The usual notion of the combinatorial Laplacian for a graph involves edge weights. Namely, a Laplacian ℒ for G is a matrix with rows and columns indexed by the vertex set V of G, and the (u, v)-entry of ℒ for u, v in G, u ≠v, is associated with the edge-weight of the edge (u, v). It is not so obvious to consider Laplacians with vertex weights (except for using some symmetric combinations of the vertex weights to define edge-weights). In this note, we consider a vertex weighted Laplacian which is motivated by a problem arising in the study of algebro-geometric aspects of the Bethe Ansatz [18]. The usual Laplacian can be regarded as a special case with all vertex-weights equal. We will generalize the matrix-tree theorem to matrix-tree theorems of counting "rooted" directed spanning trees. In addition, the characteristic polynomial of the vertex-weighted Laplacian has coefficients with similar interpretations. We also consider subgraphs with non-trial boundary. We will shown that the Laplacian with Dirichlet boundary condition has its determinant equal to the number of rooted spanning forests. The usual matrix-tree theorem is a special case with the boundary consisting of one single vertex. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.