English

Cellular spanning trees and Laplacians of cubical complexes

Combinatorics 2011-10-05 v3

Abstract

We prove a Matrix-Tree Theorem enumerating the spanning trees of a cell complex in terms of the eigenvalues of its cellular Laplacian operators, generalizing a previous result for simplicial complexes. As an application, we obtain explicit formulas for spanning tree enumerators and Laplacian eigenvalues of cubes; the latter are integers. We prove a weighted version of the eigenvalue formula, providing evidence for a conjecture on weighted enumeration of cubical spanning trees. We introduce a cubical analogue of shiftedness, and obtain a recursive formula for the Laplacian eigenvalues of shifted cubical complexes, in particular, these eigenvalues are also integers. Finally, we recover Adin's enumeration of spanning trees of a complete colorful simplicial complex from the cellular Matrix-Tree Theorem together with a result of Kook, Reiner and Stanton.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0908.1956,
  title  = {Cellular spanning trees and Laplacians of cubical complexes},
  author = {Art M. Duval and Caroline J. Klivans and Jeremy L. Martin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.1956},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

24 pages, revised version, to appear in Advances in Applied Mathematics

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:35:18.441Z