On the Laplacian Eigenvalues and Metric Parameters of Hypergraphs

The aim of this paper is to generalize some concepts and recent results of the algebraic graph theory in order to investigate and describe, by algebraic methods, the properties of some combinatorial structures. Here we introduce a version of "Laplacian matrix" of a hypergraph and we obtain several spectral-like results on its metric parameters, such as the diameter, mean distance, excess, bandwidth and cutsets.