Characterizing Trees with Large Laplacian Energy

We investigate the problem of ordering trees according to their Laplacian energy. More precisely, given a positive integer $n$, we find a class of cardinality approximately $\sqrt{n}$ whose elements are the $n$-vertex trees with largest Laplacian energy. The main tool for establishing this result is a new upper bound on the sum $S_k(T)$ of the $k$ largest Laplacian eigenvalues of an $n$-vertex tree $T$ with diameter at least four, where $k \in \{1,...,n\}$.