Spectrally extremal vertices, strong cospectrality and state transfer

Abstract

In order to obtain perfect state transfer between two sites in a network of interacting qubits, their corresponding vertices in the underlying graph must satisfy a combinatorial property called strong cospectrality. Here we determine the structure of graphs containing pairs of vertices which are strongly cospectral and satisfy a certain extremal property related to the spectrum of the graph. If the graph satisfies this property globally and is regular, we also show that the existence of a partition of the vertex set into pairs of vertices at maximum distance admitting perfect state transfer forces the graph to be distance-regular.