Edge-disjoint spanning trees and eigenvalues of regular graphs

Abstract

Partially answering a question of Paul Seymour, we obtain a sufficient eigenvalue condition for the existence of $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees in a regular graph, when $k\in \{2,3\}$. More precisely, we show that if the second largest eigenvalue of a $d$-regular graph $G$ is less than $d-\frac{2k-1}{d+1}$, then $G$ contains at least $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees, when $k\in \{2,3\}$. We construct examples of graphs that show our bounds are essentially best possible. We conjecture that the above statement is true for any $k<d/2$.