Relation between the H-rank of a mixed graph and the rank of its underlying graph

Chen Chen, Shuchao Li

Published 2018-12-13Version 1

Given a simple graph $G=(V_G, E_G)$ with vertex set $V_G$ and edge set $E_G$, the mixed graph $\widetilde{G}$ is obtained from $G$ by orienting some of its edges. Let $H(\widetilde{G})$ denote the Hermitian adjacency matrix of $\widetilde{G}$ and $A(G)$ be the adjacency matrix of $G$. The $H$-rank (resp. rank) of $\widetilde{G}$ (resp. $G$), written as $rk(\widetilde{G})$ (resp. $r(G)$), is the rank of $H(\widetilde{G})$ (resp. $A(G)$). Denote by $d(G)$ the dimension of cycle spaces of $G$, that is $d(G) = |E_G|-|V_G|+\omega(G)$, where $\omega(G),$ denotes the number of connected components of $G$. In this paper, we concentrate on the relation between the $H$-rank of $\widetilde{G}$ and the rank of $G$. Firstly, it is proved that $-2d(G)\leqslant rk(\widetilde{G})-r(G)\leqslant 2d(G)$ for every mixed graph $\widetilde{G}$. Secondly, all the mixed graphs that attain the upper or the lower bound are characterized respectively. By these obtained results in the current paper, as a unified approach, all those main results obtained in [European J. Combin. 54 (2016) 76-86] can be deduced consequently.