English

Isospectral Cayley graphs with even and odd spectrum

Combinatorics 2026-04-22 v2

Abstract

For a group GG and subsets S,TGS,T \subset G we introduce the mirror di-Cayley graph MX(G;S,T)MX(G;S,T) and mirror di-Cayley sum graph MX+(G;S,T)MX^+(G;S,T) with connections sets SS and TT (MDCGs for short). We refer to them indistinctly by MX(G;S,T)MX^*(G;S,T). We then consider the family F\mathcal{F} of those MDCGs with TST \in \mathcal{S}, where S={{e},S,S{e}}\mathcal{S}= \big\{ \{e\}, S, S \cup \{e\} \big\}. We compute the spectra of the graphs MX(G;S,T)MX^*(G;S,T), with TST \in \mathcal{S}, in terms of those of the corresponding Cayley graphs X(G,S)X^*(G,S). We show that if X(G,S)X(G,S) has integral spectrum then MX(G;S,T)MX^*(G;S,T) is also integral for any TST \in \mathcal{S}, but MX(G;S,S)MX^*(G;S,S) has even spectrum (all even eigenvalues) and MX(G;S,S{e})MX^*(G;S,S \cup \{e\}) has odd spectrum (all odd eigenvalues), an interesting phenomenom which seems to be new. We then study isospectrality between different pairs of MDCGs in terms of the isospectrality of the underlying Cayley graphs. Finally, using unitary Cayley graphs X(R,R)X(R,R^*) over a finite commutative ring RR, which is known to be integral, we construct pairs of integral isospectral mirror di-Cayley (sum) graphs {MX(R;R,T),MX+(R;R,T)}\{ MX(R;R^*, T), MX^+(R;R^*, T) \}, both with even (resp.\@ odd) spectrum for T=RT=R^* (resp.\@ T=R{0}T=R^* \cup \{0\}). All these examples can be seen as Cayley (sum) graphs over G=R×Z2G=R \times \mathbb{Z}_2, hence obtaining pairs of even and odd isospectral Cayley graphs of the form {Γ,Γ+}\{\Gamma, \Gamma^+\}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.05510,
  title  = {Isospectral Cayley graphs with even and odd spectrum},
  author = {Paula M. Chiapparoli and Ricardo A. Podestá},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.05510},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

38 pages, 2 figures. We added Remark 4.4, a subsubsection on circulant graphs and Example 6.4

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:57:18.433Z