The six classes of trees with the largest algebraic connectivity

In this paper, we study the algebraic connectivity α(T) of a tree T. We introduce six Classes (C1)-(C6) of trees of order n, and prove that if T is a tree of order n?15, then if and only if , where the equality holds if and only if T is a tree in the Class (C6). At the same time we give a complete ordering of the trees in these six classes by their algebraic connectivity. In particular, we show that α(T_i)>α(T_j) if 1?i<j?6 and T_i is any tree in the Class (Ci) and T_j is any tree in the Class (Cj). We also give the values of the algebraic connectivity of the trees in these six classes. As a technique used in the proofs of the above mentioned results, we also give a complete characterization of the equality case of a well-known relation between the algebraic connectivity of a tree T and the Perron value of the bottleneck matrix of a Perron branch of T.