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Strengthening Wilf's lower bound on clique number

Discrete Mathematics 2025-04-08 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Given an integer kk, deciding whether a graph has a clique of size kk is an NP-complete problem. Wilf's inequality provides a spectral bound for the clique number of simple graphs. Wilf's inequality is stated as follows: nnλ1ω\frac{n}{n - \lambda_{1}} \leq \omega, where λ1\lambda_1 is the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix A(G)A(G), nn is the number of vertices in GG, and ω\omega is the clique number of GG. Strengthening this bound, Elphick and Wocjan proposed a conjecture in 2018, which is stated as follows: nns+ω\frac{n}{n - \sqrt{s^{+}}} \leq \omega, where s+=λi>0λi2s^+ = \sum_{\lambda_{i} > 0} \lambda_{i}^2 and λi\lambda_i are the eigenvalues of A(G)A(G). In this paper, we have settled this conjecture for some classes of graphs, such as conference graphs, strongly regular graphs with λ=μ\lambda = \mu (i.e., srg(n,d,μ,μ)srg(n, d, \mu, \mu)) and n2dn\geq 2d, the line graph of KnK_{n}, the Cartesian product of strongly regular graphs, and Ramanujan graph with n11dn\geq 11d.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.04836,
  title  = {Strengthening Wilf's lower bound on clique number},
  author = {Hareshkumar Jadav and Sreekara Madyastha and Rahul Raut and Ranveer Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.04836},
  year   = {2025}
}

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8 pages