An Upper Bound for the Height of a Tree with a Given Eigenvalue

Abstract

In this paper we prove that every totally real algebraic integer \(\lambda \) of degree \(d \ge 2\) occurs as an eigenvalue of some tree of height at most \(d(d+1)/2+3\). In order to prove this, for a given algebraic number \(\alpha \ne 0\), we investigate an additive semigroup that contains zero and is closed under the map \(x \mapsto \alpha /(1-x)\) for \(x \ne 1\). The problem of finding the smallest such semigroup seems to be of independent interest.