Gap sets for the spectra of regular graphs with minimum spectral gap

Abstract

Following recent work by Kollár and Sarnak, we study gaps in the spectra of large connected cubic and quartic graphs with minimum spectral gap. We focus on two sequences of graphs, denoted Δn and Γn which are more ‘symmetric’ compared to the other graphs in these two families, respectively. We prove that (1,5] is a gap interval for Δn, and [(−1+17)/2,3] is a gap interval for Γn. We conjecture that these two are indeed maximal gap intervals. As a by-product, we show that the eigenvalues of Δn lying in the interval [−3,−5] (in particular, its minimum eigenvalue) converge to (1−33)/2 and the eigenvalues of Γn lying in the interval [−4,−(1+17)/2] (and in particular, its minimum eigenvalue) converge to 1−13 as n tends to infinity. The proofs of the above results heavily depend on the following property which can be of independent interest: with few exceptions, all the eigenvalues of connected cubic and quartic graphs with minimum spectral gap are simple.