Spectral radius and edge-disjoint spanning trees

Abstract

The spanning tree packing number of a graph $G$, denoted by $\tau(G)$, is the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees contained in $G$. The study of $\tau(G)$ is one of the classic problems in graph theory. Cioab\u{a} and Wong initiated to investigate $\tau(G)$ from spectral perspectives in 2012 and since then, $\tau(G)$ has been well studied using the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix in the past decade. In this paper, we further extend the results in terms of the number of edges and the spectral radius, respectively; and prove tight sufficient conditions to guarantee $\tau(G)\geq k$ with extremal graphs characterized. Moreover, we confirm a conjecture of Ning, Lu and Wang on characterizing graphs with the maximum spectral radius among all graphs with a given order as well as fixed minimum degree and fixed edge connectivity. Our results have important applications in rigidity and nowhere-zero flows. We conclude with some open problems in the end.