Asymptotic Enumeration of Spanning Trees

Russell Lyons

Published 2002-12-11, updated 2005-07-15Version 7

We give new general formulas for the asymptotics of the number of spanning trees of a large graph. A special case answers a question of McKay (1983) for regular graphs. The general answer involves a quantity for infinite graphs that we call "tree entropy", which we show is a logarithm of a normalized determinant of the graph Laplacian for infinite graphs. Tree entropy is also expressed using random walks. We relate tree entropy to the metric entropy of the uniform spanning forest process on quasi-transitive amenable graphs, extending a result of Burton and Pemantle (1993).