Maximization of the first Laplace eigenvalue of a finite graph

Abstract

Given a length function on the edge set of a finite graph, we define a vertex-weight and an edge-weight in terms of it and consider the corresponding graph Laplacian. In this paper, we consider the problem of maximizing the first nonzero eigenvalue of this Laplacian over all edge-length functions subject to a certain normalization. For an extremal solution of this problem, we prove that there exists a map from the vertex set to a Euclidean space consisting of first eigenfunctions of the corresponding Laplacian so that the length function can be explicitly expressed in terms of the map and the Euclidean distance. This is a graph-analogue of Nadirashvili's result related to first-eigenvalue maximization problem on a smooth surface. We discuss simple examples and also prove a similar result for a maximizing solution of the Göring-Helmberg-Wappler problem.