Nodal domain theorems for pp-Laplacians on signed graphs

We establish various nodal domain theorems for generalized $p$-Laplacians on signed graphs, which unify most of the results on nodal domains of graph $p$-Laplacians and arbitrary symmetric matrices. Based on our nodal domain estimates, we also obtain a higher order Cheeger inequality that relates the variational eigenvalues of $p$-Laplacians and Atay-Liu's multi-way Cheeger constants on signed graphs. Moreover, we show new results for 1-Laplacian on signed graphs, including a sharp upper bound of the number of nonzeros of certain eigenfunction corresponding to the $k$-th variational eigenvalues, and some identities relating variational eigenvalues and $k$-way Cheeger constants.Comment: 31 pages. Comments are welcome

Graphs with many strong orientations

We establish mild conditions under which a possibly irregular, sparse graph $G$ has "many" strong orientations. Given a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices, orient each edge in either direction with probability $1/2$ independently. We show that if $G$ satisfies a minimum degree condition of $(1+c_1)\log_2{n}$ and has Cheeger constant at least $c_2\frac{\log_2\log_2{n}}{\log_2{n}}$, then the resulting randomly oriented directed graph is strongly connected with high probability. This Cheeger constant bound can be replaced by an analogous spectral condition via the Cheeger inequality. Additionally, we provide an explicit construction to show our minimum degree condition is tight while the Cheeger constant bound is tight up to a $\log_2\log_2{n}$ factor.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures; revised version includes more background and minor changes that better clarify the expositio

Isoperimetric Inequalities in Simplicial Complexes

In graph theory there are intimate connections between the expansion properties of a graph and the spectrum of its Laplacian. In this paper we define a notion of combinatorial expansion for simplicial complexes of general dimension, and prove that similar connections exist between the combinatorial expansion of a complex, and the spectrum of the high dimensional Laplacian defined by Eckmann. In particular, we present a Cheeger-type inequality, and a high-dimensional Expander Mixing Lemma. As a corollary, using the work of Pach, we obtain a connection between spectral properties of complexes and Gromov's notion of geometric overlap. Using the work of Gunder and Wagner, we give an estimate for the combinatorial expansion and geometric overlap of random Linial-Meshulam complexes