Unified spectral bounds on the chromatic number

Clive Elphick, Pawel Wocjan

Published 2012-10-29, updated 2014-10-29Version 5

One of the best known results in spectral graph theory is the following lower bound on the chromatic number due to Alan Hoffman, where mu_1 and mu_n are respectively the maximum and minimum eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix: chi >= 1 + mu_1 / (- mu_n). We recently generalised this bound to include all eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix. In this paper, we further generalize these results to include all eigenvalues of the adjacency, Laplacian and signless Laplacian matrices. The various known bounds are also unified by considering the normalized adjacency matrix, and examples are cited for which the new bounds outperform known bounds.