Which exterior powers are balanced? (Q1953535)

Summary: A signed graph is a graph whose edges are given \(\pm 1\) weights. In such a graph, the sign of a cycle is the product of the signs of its edges. A signed graph is called balanced if its adjacency matrix is similar to the adjacency matrix of an unsigned graph via conjugation by a diagonal \(\pm 1\) matrix. For a signed graph \(\Sigma\) on \(n\) vertices, its exterior \(k\)th power, where \(k=1,\ldots,n-1\), is a graph \(\bigwedge^{k} \Sigma\) whose adjacency matrix is given by \[ A\left({\bigwedge^{k} \Sigma}\right) =P_{\wedge}^{\dagger} A\left(\Sigma^{\square k}\right) P_{\wedge}, \] where \(P_{\wedge}\) is the projector onto the anti-symmetric subspace of the \(k\)-fold tensor product space \((\mathbb{C}^{n})^{\otimes k}\) and \(\Sigma^{\square k}\) is the \(k\)-fold Cartesian product of \(\Sigma\) with itself. The exterior power creates a signed graph from any graph, even unsigned. We prove sufficient and necessary conditions so that \(\bigwedge^{k} \Sigma\) is balanced. For \(k=1,\ldots,n-2\), the condition is that either \(\Sigma\) is a signed path or \(\Sigma\) is a signed cycle that is balanced for odd \(k\) or is unbalanced for even \(k\); for \(k=n-1\), the condition is that each even cycle in \(\Sigma\) is positive and each odd cycle in \(\Sigma\) is negative.