Further developments on Brouwer's conjecture for the sum of Laplacian eigenvalues of graphs

Abstract

Let G be a simple graph with order n and size m and having Laplacian eigenvalues μ1,μ2,…,μn−1,μn=0 and let Sk(G)=∑i=1kμi be the sum of k largest Laplacian eigenvalues of G. Brouwer conjectured that Sk(G)≤m+(k+12), for all k=1,2,…,n. We obtain upper bounds for Sk(G), in terms of the clique number ω, the order n and integers p≥0,r≥1,s1≥s2≥2 associated to the structure of the graph G. We discuss Brouwer's conjecture for two large families of graphs; the first family of graphs is obtained from a clique of size ω by identifying each of its vertices to a vertex of an arbitrary c-cyclic graph, and the second family is composed of the graphs in which the removal of the edges of the maximal complete bipartite subgraph gives a graph each of whose non-trivial components is a c-cyclic graph. We show among these two large families of graphs, the Brouwer's conjecture holds for various subfamilies of graphs depending upon the value of c, the order of the c-cyclic graphs, the clique number of the graph, the order of the maximal complete bipartite subgraph and the number of the c-cyclic components of the graph.