A Spinorial Formulation of the Maximum Clique Problem of a Graph

Abstract

We present a new formulation of the maximum clique problem of a graph in complex space. We start observing that the adjacency matrix A of a graph can always be written in the form A = B B where B is a complex, symmetric matrix formed by vectors of zero length (null vectors) and the maximum clique problem can be transformed in a geometrical problem for these vectors. This problem, in turn, is translated in spinorial language and we show that each graph uniquely identifies a set of pure spinors, that is vectors of the endomorphism space of Clifford algebras, and the maximum clique problem is formalized in this setting so that, this much studied problem, may take advantage from recent progresses of pure spinor geometry.