The unitary Cayley graph of upper triangular matrix rings

Abstract

The unitary Cayley graph $C_R$ of a finite unital ring $R$ is the simple graph with vertex set $R$ in which two elements $x$ and $y$ are connected by an edge if and only if $x-y$ is a unit of $R$. We characterize the unitary Cayley graph $C_{T_n(\mathbb{F})}$ of the ring of all upper triangular matrices $T_n(\mathbb{F})$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}$. We show that $C_{T_n(\mathbb{F})}$ is isomorphic to the semistrong product of the complete graph $K_m$ and the antipodal graph of the Hamming graph $A(H(n,p^k))$, where $m=p^{\frac{kn(n-1)}{2}}$ and $|\mathbb{F}|=p^k$. In particular, if $|\mathbb{F}|=2$, then the graph $C_{T_n(\mathbb{F})}$ has $2^{n-1}$ connected components, each component is isomorphic to the complete bipartite graph $K_{m,m}$, where $m=2^{\frac{n(n-1)}{2}}$. We also compute the diameter, triameter, and clique number of the graph $C_{T_n(\mathbb{F})}$.