Doubly stochastic matrices of trees

In this paper, we obtain sharp upper and lower bounds for the smallest entries of doubly stochastic matrices of trees and characterize all extreme graphs which attain the bounds. We also present a counterexample to Merris' conjecture on relations between the smallest entry of the doubly stochastic matrix and the algebraic connectivity of a graph in [R. Merris, Doubly stochastic graph matrices II, Linear Multilinear Algebr. 45 (1998) 275-285].