Some Relations between Rank, Chromatic Number and Energy of Graphs

Abstract

The energy of a graph $G$, denoted by $E(G)$, is defined as the sum of the absolute values of all eigenvalues of $G$. Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$ and $\mathrm{rank}(G)$ be the rank of the adjacency matrix of $G$. In this paper we characterize all graphs with $E(G)=\mathrm{rank}(G)$. Among other results we show that apart from a few families of graphs, $E(G)\ge 2\max (\chi (G),n-\chi (\bar{G}))$, where $n$ is the number of vertices of $G$, $\bar{G}$ and $\chi (G)$ are the complement and the chromatic number of $G$, respectively. Moreover some new lower bounds for $E(G)$ in terms of $\mathrm{rank}(G)$ are given.

Accepted for publication in Discrete Mathematics