The Diameter and Laplacian Eigenvalues of Directed Graphs

  • Fan Chung

Abstract

For undirected graphs it has been known for some time that one can bound the diameter using the eigenvalues. In this note we give a similar result for the diameter of strongly connected directed graphs $G$, namely $$ D(G) \leq \bigg \lfloor {2\min_x \log (1/\phi(x))\over \log{2\over 2-\lambda}} \bigg\rfloor +1 $$ where $\lambda$ is the first non-trivial eigenvalue of the Laplacian and $\phi$ is the Perron vector of the transition probability matrix of a random walk on $G$.

Published
2006-02-22
Article Number
N4