On the Spectra of Digraph Laplacians

Abstract

We present several Laplacian-type matrices associated with a loopless digraph $D$: the out-/in-degree Laplacians $\mathcal L_{\mathrm{out}},\mathcal L_{\mathrm{in}}$, the incidence Laplacian $\mathcal L_{\mathrm{inc}}=BB^{\mathsf T}$, and the symmetrized and skew-symmetrized variants $\mathcal S_{\mathrm{out}},\mathcal K_{\mathrm{out}}$. We show that $\mathcal L_{\mathrm{inc}}(D)$ coincides with the Laplacian of the underlying undirected multigraph, and we derive spectral and characteristic-polynomial relations under arc reversal and complementation (including a simplification for Eulerian digraphs for $\mathcal S_{\mathrm{out}}$). We demonstrate that the spectral radius of $\mathcal L_{\mathrm{out}}$ is bounded above by the order of the digraph and give a characterization in the equality case. We further obtain explicit formulas for joins and line digraphs, giving a general determinantal identity relating the out-degree Laplacian characteristic polynomials of a regular digraph and its line digraph.