Rigidity of the Bonnet-Myers inequality for graphs with respect to Ollivier Ricci curvature

Abstract

We introduce the notion of Bonnet-Myers and Lichnerowicz sharpness in the Ollivier Ricci curvature sense. Our main result is a classification of all self-centered Bonnet-Myers sharp graphs (hypercubes, cocktail party graphs, even-dimensional demi-cubes, Johnson graphs J(2n,n), the Gosset graph and suitable Cartesian products). We also present a purely combinatorial reformulation of this result. We show that Bonnet-Myers sharpness implies Lichnerowicz sharpness and classify all distance-regular Lichnerowicz sharp graphs under the additional condition θ1=b1−1. We also relate Bonnet-Myers sharpness to an upper bound of Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature, which motivates a general conjecture about Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature.