On Laplacian spectrum of dendrite trees

Abstract

For dendrite graphs from biological experiments on mouse's retinal ganglion cells, a paper by Nakatsukasa, Saito and Woei reveals a mysterious phase transition phenomenon in the spectra of the corresponding graph Laplacian matrices. While the bulk of the spectrum can be well understood by structures resembling starlike trees, mysteries about the spikes, that is, isolated eigenvalues outside the bulk spectrum, remain unexplained. In this paper, we bring new insights on these mysteries by considering a class of uniform trees. Exact relationships between the number of such spikes and the number of T-junctions are analyzed in function of the number of vertices separating the T-junctions. Using these theoretical results, predictions are proposed for the number of spikes observed in real-life dendrite graphs. Interestingly enough, these predictions match well the observed numbers of spikes, thus confirm the practical meaningness of our theoretical results.