A tensor's spectral bound on the clique number

Abstract

In this paper, we study the spectral radius of the clique tensor A(G) associated with a graph G. This tensor is a higher-order extensions of the adjacency matrix of G. A lower bound of the clique number is given via the spectral radius of A(G). It is an extension of Nikiforov's spectral bound and tighter than the bound of Nikiforov in some classes of graphs. Furthermore, we obtain a spectral version of the Erdos-Simonovits stability theorem for clique tensors based on this bound.