More on the skew-spectra of bipartite graphs and Cartesian products of graphs

Xiaolin Chen, Xueliang Li, Huishu Lian

Published 2013-05-15Version 1

Given a graph $G$, let $G^\sigma$ be an oriented graph of $G$ with the orientation $\sigma$ and skew-adjacency matrix $S(G^\sigma)$. Then the spectrum of $S(G^\sigma)$ is called the skew-spectrum of $G^\sigma$, denoted by $Sp_S(G^\sigma)$. It is known that a graph $G$ is bipartite if and only if there is an orientation $\sigma$ of $G$ such that $Sp_S(G^\sigma)=iSp(G)$. In [D. Cui, Y. Hou, On the skew spectra of Cartesian products of graphs, Electron. J. Combin. 20(2013), #P19], Cui and Hou conjectured that such orientation of a bipartite graph is unique under switching-equivalence. In this paper, we prove that the conjecture is true. Moreover, we give an orientation of the Cartesian product of a bipartite graph and a graph, and then determine the skew-spectrum of the resulting oriented product graph, which generalizes Cui and Hou's result, and can be used to construct more oriented graphs with maximum skew energy.