We define the matching measure of a lattice L as the spectral measure of the
tree of self-avoiding walks in L. We connect this invariant to the
monomer-dimer partition function of a sequence of finite graphs converging to
L.
This allows us to express the monomer-dimer free energy of L in terms of the
measure. Exploiting an analytic advantage of the matching measure over the
Mayer series then leads to new, rigorous bounds on the monomer-dimer free
energies of various Euclidean lattices. While our estimates use only the
computational data given in previous papers, they improve the known bounds
significantly.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
