A new criterion for oriented graphs to be determined by their generalized skew spectrum

TL;DR

This paper improves a spectral characterization criterion for self-converse oriented graphs by removing the square-free restriction on an integer parameter, using properties of the walk-matrix over finite fields.

Contribution

It removes the square-freeness assumption in a spectral criterion for oriented graphs, broadening the class of graphs characterized by their generalized skew spectrum.

Findings

The square-freeness condition on d is unnecessary for the spectral characterization.

The kernel of the walk-matrix transpose is anisotropic over finite fields under certain conditions.

The new criterion applies to a wider class of self-converse oriented graphs.

Abstract

Spectral characterizations of graphs is an important topic in spectral graph theory which has been studied extensively by researchers in recent years. The study of oriented graphs, however, has received less attention so far. In Qiu et al.~\cite{QWW} (Linear Algebra Appl. 622 (2021) 316-332), the authors gave an arithmetic criterion for an oriented graph to be determined by its \emph{generalized skew spectrum} (DGSS for short). More precisely, let $\Sigma$ be an $n$-vertex oriented graph with skew adjacency matrix $S$ and $W(\Sigma)=[e,Se,\ldots,S^{n-1}e]$ be the \emph{walk-matrix} of $\Sigma$, where $e$ is the all-one vector. A theorem of Qiu et al.~\cite{QWW} shows that a self-converse oriented graph $\Sigma$ is DGSS, provided that the Smith normal form of $W(\Sigma)$ is ${\rm diag}(1,\ldots,1,2,\ldots,2,2d)$, where $d$ is an odd and square-free integer and the number of $1$'s appeared in the diagonal is precisely $\lceil \frac{n}{2}\rceil$. In this paper, we show that the above square-freeness assumptions on $d$ can actually be removed, which significantly improves upon the above theorem. Our new ingredient is a key intermediate result, which is of independent interest: for a self-converse oriented graphs $\Sigma$ and an odd prime $p$, if the rank of $W(\Sigma)$ is $n-1$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$, then the kernel of $W(\Sigma)^{\rm T}$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$ is \emph{anisotropic}, i.e., $v^{\rm T}v\neq 0$ for any $0\ne v\in{{\rm ker}\,W(\Sigma)^{\rm T}}$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$.