Godsil-McKay switchings for gain graphs

Abstract

We introduce a switching operation, inspired by the Godsil-McKay switching, in order to obtain pairs of G-cospectral gain graphs, that are gain graphs cospectral with respect to every representation of the gain group G. For instance, for two signed graphs, this notion of cospectrality is equivalent to the cospectrality of their signed adjacency matrices together with the cospectrality of their underlying graphs. Moreover, we introduce another more flexible switching in order to obtain pairs of gain graphs cospectral with respect to some fixed unitary representation. Many existing notions of spectrum for graphs and gain graphs are indeed special cases of these spectra associated with particular representations, therefore our construction recovers the classical Godsil-McKay switching and the Godsil-McKay switching for signed and complex unit gain graphs. As in the classical case, not all gain graphs are suitable for these switchings: we analyze the relationships between the properties that make the graph suitable for the one or the other switching. Finally we apply our construction in order to define a Godsil-McKay switching for the right spectrum of quaternion unit gain graphs.