Unified approach for spectral properties of weighted adjacency matrices for graphs with degree-based edge-weights

Abstract

Let G be a graph and di be the degree of a vertex vi in G. For a symmetric real function f(x,y), one can get an edge-weighted graph in such a way that for each edge vivj of G, the weight of vivj is assigned by f(di,dj). Hence, we have a weighted adjacency matrix Af(G) of G, in which the ij-entry is equal to f(di,dj) if vivj∈E(G) and 0 otherwise. In this paper, we use a unified approach to deal with the spectral properties of Af(G) for f(x,y) to be the functions of graphical or topological function-indices. Firstly, we obtain uniform interlacing inequalities for the weighted adjacency eigenvalues. For the edge-weight functions defined by almost a half of popularly used topological indices, it can be shown that our inequalities cannot be improved. Secondly, we establish a uniform equivalent condition for a connected graph G to have m distinct weighted adjacency eigenvalues. As an application, a combinatorial characterization for a graph to have two and three distinct weighted adjacency eigenvalues is presented, respectively. Moreover, bipartite graphs and unicyclic graphs with three distinct weighted adjacency eigenvalues are characterized. This paper attempts to unify the spectral study for weighted adjacency matrices of graphs with degree-based edge-weights.