On the nullities of quartic circulant graphs and their extremal null spaces

Abstract

A circulant graph is a simple graph whose adjacency matrix can be represented in the form of a circulant matrix, while a nut graph is considered to be a graph whose null space is spanned by a single full vector. In a previous study by Damnjanovi\'c [arXiv:2212.03026, 2022], the complete set of all the pairs $(n, d)$ for which there exists a $d$-regular circulant nut graph of order $n$ has been determined. Motivated by the said results, we put our focus on the quartic circulant graphs and derive an explicit formula for computing their nullities. Furthermore, we implement the aforementioned formula in order to obtain a method for inspecting the singularity of a particular quartic circulant graph and find the concise criteria to be used for testing whether such a graph is a nut graph. Subsequently, we compute the minimum and maximum nullity that a quartic circulant graph of a fixed order $n$ can attain, for each viable order $n \ge 5$. Finally, we determine all the graphs attaining these nullities and then provide a full characterization of all of their corresponding extremal null spaces.