Alon–Boppana
bound
In spectral graph theory, the Alon–
Boppana bound provides a lower bound on
the second-largest eigenvalue of the
adjacency matrix of a -regular graph,[1]
meaning a graph in which every vertex has
degree . The reason for the interest in the
second-largest eigenvalue is that the
largest eigenvalue is guaranteed to be
due to -regularity, with the all-ones vector
being the associated eigenvalue. The
graphs that come close to meeting this
bound are the Ramanujan graphs and are
examples of expander graphs.
Theorem statement
Let be a -regular graph on vertices,
and let be its adjacency matrix. Let
be its eigenvalues.
Then
The above statement is the original one
proved by Noga Alon. Some slightly
weaker variants exist to improve the ease
of proof or improve intuition. Two of these
are shown in the proofs below.
Intuition
The Cayley graph of the free group on two generators
and is an example of an infinite -regular tree for
The intuition for the number
comes from considering the infinite -
regular tree.[2] This graph is a universal
cover of -regular graphs, and it has
spectral radius
Saturation
A graph that essentially saturates the
Alon–Boppana bound is called a
Ramanujan graph. More precisely, a
Ramanujan graph is a -regular graph
such that
A theorem by Friedman[3] shows that, for
every and and for sufficiently
large , a random -regular graph on
vertices satisfies
with
high probability. This means that a random
-vertex -regular graph is typically
"almost Ramanujan."
First proof (slightly weaker
statement)
We will prove a slightly weaker statement,
namely dropping the specificity on the
second term and simply asserting
Here, the
term refers to the asymptotic behavior as
grows without bound while remains
fixed.
Let the vertex set be By the min-max
theorem, it suffices to construct a nonzero
vector such that and
Pick some value For each vertex in
define a vector as
follows. Each component will be indexed
by a vertex in the graph. For each if
the distance between and is then
the -component of is
if
and if We claim that
any such vector satisfies
To prove this, let denote the set of all
vertices that have a distance of exactly
from First, note that
Second, note that
where the last term on the right comes
from a possible overcounting of terms in
the initial expression. The above then
implies
which, when combined with the fact that
for any yields
The combination of the above results
proves the desired inequality.
For convenience, define the -ball
of a vertex to be the set of vertices with
a distance of at most from
Notice that the entry of
corresponding to a vertex is nonzero if
and only if lies in the -ball of
The number of vertices within distance
of a given vertex is at most
Therefore, if then there
exist vertices with distance at least
Let and It then
follows that because there is
no vertex that lies in the -balls of
both and It is also true that
because no vertex in the
-ball of can be adjacent to a
vertex in the -ball of
Now, there exists some constant such
that satisfies
Then, since
Finally, letting grow without bound while
ensuring that (this can be
done by letting grow sublogarithmically
as a function of ) makes the error term
in
Second proof (slightly
modified statement)
This proof will demonstrate a slightly
modified result, but it provides better
intuition for the source of the number
Rather than showing that
we will show
that
First, pick some value Notice that
the number of closed walks of length is
However, it is also true that the number of
closed walks of length starting at a
fixed vertex in a -regular graph is at
least the number of such walks in an
infinite -regular tree, because an infinite
-regular tree can be used to cover the
graph. By the definition of the Catalan
numbers, this number is at least
where
is the Catalan number.
It follows that
Letting grow without bound and letting
grow without bound but sublogarithmically
in yields
References
1. Nilli, A. (1991), "On the second
eigenvalue of a graph", Discrete
Mathematics, 91 (2): 207–210,
doi:10.1016/0012-365X(91)90112-F ,
MR 1124768
2. Hoory, S.; Linial, N.; Wigderson, A.
(2006), "Expander Graphs and their
Applications" (PDF), Bull. Amer. Math.
Soc. (N.S.), 43 (4): 439–561,
doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-06-01126-8
3. Friedman, Joel (2003). "Relative
expanders or weakly relatively
Ramanujan graphs" . Duke Math. J.
118, no. 1: 19–35.
Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alon–
Boppana_bound&oldid=933807502"
Last edited 1 month ago by Michael Hardy
Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless
otherwise noted.
