Quantum walks on join graphs

Abstract: The join $X\vee Y$ of two graphs $X$ and $Y$ is the graph obtained by joining each vertex of $X$ to each vertex of $Y$. We explore the behaviour of a continuous quantum walk on a weighted join graph having the adjacency matrix or Laplacian matrix as its associated Hamiltonian. We characterize strong cospectrality, periodicity and perfect state transfer (PST) in a join graph. We also determine conditions in which strong cospectrality, periodicity and PST are preserved in the join. Under certain conditions, we show that there are graphs with no PST that exhibits PST when joined by another graph. This suggests that the join operation is promising in producing new graphs with PST. Moreover, for a periodic vertex in $X$ and $X\vee Y$, we give an expression that relates its minimum periods in $X$ and $X\vee Y$. While the join operation need not preserve periodicity and PST, we show that $\big| |U_M(X\vee Y,t){u,v}|-|U_M(X,t){u,v}| \big|\leq \frac{2}{|V(X)|}$ for all vertices $u$ and $v$ of $X$, where $U_M(X\vee Y,t)$ and $U_M(X,t)$ denote the transition matrices of $X\vee Y$ and $X$ respectively relative to either the adjacency or Laplacian matrix. We demonstrate that the bound $\frac{2}{|V(X)|}$ is tight for infinite families of graphs.