English

A positive square-energy strengthening of Tur\'an's theorem

Combinatorics 2026-07-20 v1

Abstract

Let GG be an nn-vertex graph with clique number ω(G)\omega(G), and let s+(G)s^+(G) denote the sum of the squared positive adjacency eigenvalues. We prove that s+(G)(11ω(G))n. \sqrt{s^+(G)}\le\left(1-\frac{1}{\omega(G)}\right)n. This strengthens Wilf's classical spectral Tur\'{a}n theorem and resolves a conjecture of Elphick and Wocjan. Adopting the relaxation of our companion paper on the square-energy conjecture, we reduce the theorem to a Motzkin--Straus inequality for doubly nonnegative matrices, which we prove via a local inverse-probability estimate for the Caro--Wei greedy algorithm on the complement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18044,
  title  = {A positive square-energy strengthening of Tur\'an's theorem},
  author = {Yinchen Liu and Quanyu Tang and Shengtong Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18044},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages. Comments and suggestions are welcome