Comparing the spectrum of Schr\"odinger operators on quantum graphs

Abstract

We study Schr\"odinger operators on compact finite metric graphs subject to $\delta$-coupling and standard boundary conditions. We compare the $n$-th eigenvalues of those self-adjoint realizations and derive an asymptotic result for the mean value of deviations. By doing this, we generalize recent results from Rudnick et al. obtained for domains in $\mathbb{R}^2$ to the setting of quantum graphs. This also leads to a generalization of related results previously and independently obtained in [arXiv:2212.09143] and [arXiv:2212.12531] for metric graphs. In addition, based on our main result, we introduce some notions of circumference for a (quantum) graph which might prove useful in the future.