Spectral symmetry in conference matrices

Abstract

AbstractA conference matrix of order n is an $$n\times n$$ n × n matrix C with diagonal entries 0 and off-diagonal entries $$\pm 1$$ ± 1 satisfying $$CC^\top =(n-1)I$$ C C ⊤ = ( n - 1 ) I . If C is symmetric, then C has a symmetric spectrum $$\Sigma $$ Σ (that is, $$\Sigma =-\Sigma $$ Σ = - Σ ) and eigenvalues $$\pm \sqrt{n-1}$$ ± n - 1 . We show that many principal submatrices of C also have symmetric spectrum, which leads to examples of Seidel matrices of graphs (or, equivalently, adjacency matrices of complete signed graphs) with a symmetric spectrum. In addition, we show that some Seidel matrices with symmetric spectrum can be characterized by this construction.