Fundamentals of fractional revival in graphs

Abstract

We develop a general spectral framework to analyze quantum fractional revival in quantum spin networks. In particular, we determine when the adjacency algebra of a graph contains a matrix of a block diagonal form required for fractional revival, and introduce generalizations of the notions of cospectral and strongly cospectral vertices to arbitrary subsets of vertices. We give several constructions of graphs admitting fractional revival. This work resolves two open questions of Chan et al. (2019) [6].