Spectrally extremal vertices, strong cospectrality, and state transfer (Q259181)

Summary: In order to obtain perfect state transfer between two sites in a network of interacting qubits, their corresponding vertices in the underlying graph must satisfy a property called strong cospectrality. Here we determine the structure of graphs containing pairs of vertices which are strongly cospectral and satisfy a certain extremal property related to the spectrum of the graph. If the graph satisfies this property globally and is regular, we also show that the existence of a partition of the vertex set into pairs of vertices at maximum distance admitting perfect state transfer forces the graph to be distance-regular. Finally, we present some new examples of perfect state transfer in simple graphs constructed with our technology. In particular, for odd distances, we improve the known trade-off between the distance perfect state transfer occurs in simple graphs and the size of the graph.