Hearing Euler characteristic of graphs

Abstract

The Euler characteristic $\chi =|V|-|E|$ and the total length $\mathcal{L}$ are the most important topological and geometrical characteristics of a metric graph. Here, $|V|$ and $|E|$ denote the number of vertices and edges of a graph. The Euler characteristic determines the number $\beta$ of independent cycles in a graph while the total length determines the asymptotic behavior of the energy eigenvalues via the Weyl's law. We show theoretically and confirm experimentally that the Euler characteristic can be determined (heard) from a finite sequence of the lowest eigenenergies ${\lambda }_1,\dots ,{\lambda }_N$ of a simple quantum graph, without any need to inspect the system visually. In the experiment quantum graphs are simulated by microwave networks. We demonstrate that the sequence of the lowest resonances of microwave networks with $\beta \le 3$ can be directly used in determining whether a network is planar, i.e., can be embedded in the plane. Moreover, we show that the measured Euler characteristic $\chi$ can be used as a sensitive revealer of the fully connected graphs.

References in corpus (4)

• Are Scattering Properties of Graphs Uniquely Connected to Their Shapes?
• Power spectrum analysis and missing level statistics of microwave graphs with violated time reversal invariance
• Experimental and numerical investigation of the reflection coefficient and the distributions of Wigner's reaction matrix for irregular graphs with absorption
• Non-Weyl Microwave Graphs