Spectra of extended double cover graphs

summary:The construction of the extended double cover was introduced by N. Alon [1] in 1986. For a simple graph $G$ with vertex set $V = \lbrace v_1,v_2, \dots , v_n \rbrace $, the extended double cover of $G$, denoted $G^*$, is the bipartite graph with bipartition $(X,Y)$ where $X = \lbrace x_1, x_2, \dots ,x_n \rbrace $ and $ Y = \lbrace y_1, y_2, \cdots ,y_n \rbrace $, in which $x_i$ and $y_j$ are adjacent iff $i=j$ or $v_i$ and $v_j$ are adjacent in $G$. In this paper we obtain formulas for the characteristic polynomial and the spectrum of $G^*$ in terms of the corresponding information of $G$. Three formulas are derived for the number of spanning trees in $G^*$ for a connected regular graph $G$. We show that while the extended double covers of cospectral graphs are cospectral, the converse does not hold. Some results on the spectra of the $n$th iterared double cover are also presented