Eigenvalues of signed graphs

Abstract

Signed graphs have their edges labeled either as positive or negative. $\rho(M)$ denote the $M$-spectral radius of $\Sigma$, where $M=M(\Sigma)$ is a real symmetric graph matrix of $\Sigma$. Obviously, $\rho(M)=\mbox{max}\{\lambda_1(M),-\lambda_n(M)\}$. Let $A(\Sigma)$ be the adjacency matrix of $\Sigma$ and $(K_n,H^-)$ be a signed complete graph whose negative edges induce a subgraph $H$. In this paper, we first focus on a central problem in spectral extremal graph theory as follows: Which signed graph with maximum $\rho(A(\Sigma))$ among $(K_n,T^-)$ where $T$ is a spanning tree? To answer the problem, we characterize the extremal signed graph with maximum $\lambda_1(A(\Sigma))$ and minimum $\lambda_n(A(\Sigma))$ among $(K_n,T^-)$, respectively. Another interesting graph matrix of a signed graph is distance matrix, i.e. $D(\Sigma)$ which was defined by Hameed, Shijin, Soorya, Germina and Zaslavsky [8]. Note that $A(\Sigma)=D(\Sigma)$ when $\Sigma\in (K_n,T^-)$. In this paper, we give upper bounds on the least distance eigenvalue of a signed graph $\Sigma$ with diameter at least 2. This result implies a result proved by Lin [11] was originally conjectured by Aouchiche and Hansen [1].