Bounds for the extremal eigenvalues of gain Laplacian matrices

Abstract: A complex unit gain graph ($\mathbb{T}$-gain graph), $\Phi = (G, \varphi)$ is a graph where the function $\varphi$ assigns a unit complex number to each orientation of an edge of $G$, and its inverse is assigned to the opposite orientation. A $ \mathbb{T} $-gain graph $\Phi$ is balanced if the product of the edge gains of each cycle (with a fixed orientation) is $1$. Signed graphs are special cases of $\mathbb{T}$-gain graphs. The adjacency matrix of $\Phi$, denoted by $ \mathbf{A}(\Phi)$ is defined canonically. The gain Laplacian for $\Phi$ is defined as $\mathbf{L}(\Phi) = \mathbf{D}(\Phi) - \mathbf{A}(\Phi)$, where $\mathbf{D}(\Phi)$ is the diagonal matrix with diagonal entries are the degrees of the vertices of $G$. The minimum number of vertices (resp., edges) to be deleted from $\Phi$ in order to get a balanced gain graph the frustration number (resp, frustration index). We show that frustration number and frustration index are bounded below by the smallest eigenvalue of $\mathbf{L}(\Phi)$. We provide several lower and upper bounds for extremal eigenvalues of $\mathbf{L}(\Phi)$ in terms of different graph parameters such as the number of edges, vertex degrees, and average $2$-degrees. The signed graphs are particular cases of the $\mathbb{T}$-gain graphs, all the bounds established in paper hold for signed graphs. Most of the bounds established here are new for signed graphs. Finally, we perform comparative analysis for all the obtained bounds in the paper with the state-of-the-art bounds available in the literature for randomly generated Erd\H{o}s-Re\'yni graphs. Some of the major highlights of our paper are the gain-dependent bounds, limit convergence of the bounds to the extremal eigenvalues, and optimal extremal bounds obtained by posing optimization problems to achieve the best possible bounds.