Linear programming bounds for cliques in Paley graphs

Mark Magsino, Dustin G. Mixon, Hans Parshall

Published 2019-07-12Version 1

The Lov\'{a}sz theta number is a semidefinite programming bound on the clique number of (the complement of) a given graph. Given a vertex-transitive graph, every vertex belongs to a maximal clique, and so one can instead apply this semidefinite programming bound to the local graph. In the case of the Paley graph, the local graph is circulant, and so this bound reduces to a linear programming bound, allowing for fast computations. Impressively, the value of this program with Schrijver's nonnegativity constraint rivals the state-of-the-art closed-form bound recently proved by Hanson and Petridis. We conjecture that this linear programming bound improves on the Hanson-Petridis bound infinitely often, and we derive the dual program to facilitate proving this conjecture.