On joins of a clique and a co-clique as star complements in regular graphs

Abstract

In this paper we consider $r$-regular graphs $G$ that admit the vertex set partition such that one of the induced subgraphs is the join of an $s$-vertex clique and a $t$-vertex co-clique and represents a star complement for an eigenvalue $\mu$ of $G$. The cases in which one of the parameters $s, t$ is less than 2 or $\mu=r$ are already resolved. It is conjectured in [J. Wang, X. Yuan, L. Liu, Regular graphs with a prescribed complete multipartite graph as a star complement, Linear Algebra Appl.~579 (2019) 302--319] that if $s, t\geq 2$ and $\mu\neq r$, then $\mu=-2, t=2$ and $G=\overline{(s+1)K_2}$. For $\mu=-t$ we verify this conjecture to be true. We further study the case in which $\mu\neq-t$ and confirm the conjecture provided $t^2-4\mu^2t-4\mu^3=0$. For the remaining possibility we determine the structure of a putative counterexample and relate its existence to the existence of a particular 2-class block design. It occurs that the smallest counterexample would have 1265 vertices.