Spectra of Extended Double Cover Graphs

Abstract

The construction of the extended double cover was introduced by N. Alon [1] in 1986. For a simple graph G with vertex set V = {v ₁, v ₂, ..., v _n }, the extended double cover of G, denoted G ^*, is the bipartite graph with bipartition (X, Y) where X = {x ₁, x ₂, ..., x _n } and Y = {y ₁, y ₂, ..., y _n }, in which x _i and y _j are adjacent iff i = j or v _i and v _j are adjacent in G.

In this paper we obtain formulas for the characteristic polynomial and the spectrum of G ^* in terms of the corresponding information of G. Three formulas are derived for the number of spanning trees in G ^* for a connected regular graph G. We show that while the extended double covers of cospectral graphs are cospectral, the converse does not hold. Some results on the spectra of the nth iterared double cover are also presented.