A similar problem appears when considering quantum waveguides. These are mesoscopic systems - systems built with a width on the scale of nanometers. A quantum waveguide can be thought of as a fattened graph where the edges are thin tubes. The spectrum of the Laplace operator on this domain converges to the spectrum of the Laplace operator on the graph under certain conditions. Understanding mesoscopic systems plays an important role in the field of nanotechnology.