Critical exponents of graphs

8 years 15 days ago

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The study of entrywise powers of matrices was originated by Loewner in the pursuit of the Bieberbach conjecture. Since the work of FitzGerald and Horn (1977), it is known that A◦α := (aα ij) is positive semideﬁnite for every entrywise nonnegative n × n positive semideﬁnite matrix A = (aij) if and only if α is a positive integer or α ≥ n − 2. This surprising result naturally extends the Schur product theorem, and demonstrates the existence of a sharp phase transition in preserving positivity. In this paper, we study when entrywise powers preserve positivity for matrices with structure of zeros encoded by graphs. To each graph is associated an invariant called its critical exponent, beyond which every power preserves positivity. In our main result, we determine the critical exponents of all chordal/decomposable graphs, and relate them to the geometry of the underlying graphs. We then examine the critical exponent of important families of non-chordal graphs such as cycles a...

Dominique Guillot, Apoorva Khare, Bala Rajaratnam

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