Connectivity, toughness, spanning trees of bounded degree, and the spectrum of regular graphs

Abstract

The eigenvalues of graphs are related to many of its combinatorial properties. In his fundamental work, Fiedler showed the close connections between the Laplacian eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a graph and its vertex-connectivity and edge-connectivity. We present some new results describing the connections between the spectrum of a regular graph and other combinatorial parameters such as its generalized connectivity, toughness, and the existence of spanning trees with bounded degree.