Paper 1, Section II, 17G
Part II, 2019
Let be a connected -regular graph.
(a) Show that is an eigenvalue of with multiplicity 1 and eigenvector
(b) Suppose that is strongly regular. Show that has at most three distinct eigenvalues.
(c) Conversely, suppose that has precisely three distinct eigenvalues and . Let be the adjacency matrix of and let
Show that if is an eigenvector of that is not a scalar multiple of then . Deduce that is a scalar multiple of the matrix whose entries are all equal to one. Hence show that, for depends only on whether or not vertices and are adjacent, and so is strongly regular.
(d) Which connected -regular graphs have precisely two eigenvalues? Justify your answer.