Nodal decompositions of graphs

Abstract

A nodal domain of a function is a maximally connected subset of the domain for which the function does not change sign. Courant's nodal domain theorem gives a bound on the number of nodal domains of eigenfunctions of elliptic operators. In particular, the k-th eigenfunction contains no more than k nodal domains. We prove a generalization of Courant's theorem to discrete graphs. Namely, we show that for the k-th eigenvalue of a generalized Laplacian of a discrete graph, there exists a set of corresponding eigenvectors such that each eigenvector can be decomposed into at most k nodal domains. In addition, we show this set to be of co-dimension zero with respect to the entire eigenspace.