On the spectral moments of trees with a given bipartition

Abstract

For two given positive integers $p$ and $q$ with $p\leqslant q$, we denote $\mathscr{T}_n^{p, q}={T: T$ is a tree of order $n$ with a $(p, q)$-bipartition}. For a graph $G$ with $n$ vertices, let $A(G)$ be its adjacency matrix with eigenvalues $\lambda_1(G), \lambda_2(G), ..., \lambda_n(G)$ in non-increasing order. The number $S_k(G):=\sum_{i=1}^{n}\lambda_i^k(G)\,(k=0, 1, ..., n-1)$ is called the $k$th spectral moment of $G$. Let $S(G)=(S_0(G), S_1(G),..., S_{n-1}(G))$ be the sequence of spectral moments of $G$. For two graphs $G_1$ and $G_2$, one has $G_1\prec_s G_2$ if for some $k\in {1,2,...,n-1}$, $S_i(G_1)=S_i(G_2) (i=0,1,...,k-1)$ and $S_k(G_1)<S_k(G_2)$ holds. In this paper, the last four trees, in the $S$-order, among $\mathscr{T}_n^{p, q} (4\leqslant p\leqslant q)$ are characterized.