On the characteristic and Laplacian polynomials of trees

AbstractWe find the characteristic polynomials of adjacency and Laplacian matrices of arbitrary unweighted rooted trees in term of vertex degrees, using the concept of the rooted product of graphs. Our result generalizes a result of Rojo and Soto [O. Rojo, R. Soto, The spectra of the adjacency matrix and Laplacian matrix for some balanced trees, Linear Algebra Appl. 403 (2005) 97–117] on a special class of rooted unweighted trees, namely the trees such that their vertices in the same level have equal degrees