Almost-Ramanujan Graphs and Prime Gaps

The method of Murty and Cioab\u{a} shows how one can use results about gaps between primes to construct families of almost-Ramanujan graphs. In this paper we give a simpler construction which avoids the search for perfect matchings and thus eliminates the need for computation. A couple of recent explicit bounds on the gap between consecutive primes are then used to give the construction of $k$-regular families with explicit lower bounds on the spectral gaps. We then show that a result of Ben-Aroya and Ta-Shma can be improved using our simpler construction on the assumption of the Riemann Hypothesis, which sheds some more light on a question raised by Reingold, Vadhan and Widgerson.