The Laplacian Spread of Bicyclic Graphs

The Laplacian spread of a graph is defined to be the difference between the largest eigenvalue and the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix of the graph. In our recent work, we have determined the graphs with maximal Laplacian spreads among all trees of fixed order and among all unicyclic graphs of fixed order, respectively. In this paper, we continue the work on Laplacian spread of graphs, and prove that there exist exactly two bicyclic graphs with maximal Laplacian spread among all bicyclic graphs of fixed order, which are obtained from a star by adding two incident edges and by adding two nonincident edges between the pendant vertices of the star, respectively.