Smith Normal Form and the Generalized Spectral Characterization of Graphs

Abstract: Spectral characterization of graphs is an important topic in spectral graph theory, which has received a lot of attention from researchers in recent years. It is generally very hard to show a given graph to be determined by its spectrum. Recently, Wang [10] gave a simple arithmetic condition for graphs being determined by their generalized spectra. Let $G$ be a graph with adjacency matrix $A$ on $n$ vertices, and $W=[e,Ae,\ldots,A^{n-1}e]$ ($e$ is the all-one vector) be the walk-matrix of $G$. A theorem of Wang [10] states that if $2^{-\lfloor n/2\rfloor}\det W$ (which is always an integer) is odd and square-free, then $G$ is determined by the generalized spectrum. In this paper, we find a new and short route which leads to a stronger version of the above theorem. The result is achieved by using the Smith Normal Form of the walk-matrix of $G$. The proposed method gives a new insight in dealing with the problem of generalized spectral characterization of graphs.