Minimum supports of eigenfunctions in bilinear forms graphs (Q2633614)

A non-zero function $f^\theta : V \to \mathbb{R}$ of a graph $G = (V,E)$ with adjacency matrix $A$ is an eigenfunction of $G$ corresponding to an eigenvalue $\theta$ of $A$ if it is essentially a nonzero eigenvector of $A$ corresponding to $\theta$. More precisely, it must satisfy, for all vertices $u\in V$, \[ \theta f^\theta(u) = \sum_{v\,:\,uv\in E} f^\theta(v)\,. \] The (Hamming) support $\text{Supp}(f^\theta)$ is the set $\{ u\in V : f^\theta(u)\neq 0\}$ and the (Hamming) weight of $f^\theta$ is the number $w(f^\theta) = |\text{Supp}(f^\theta)|$. For distance-regular graphs $G$, the following bound is known: \[ w(f^\theta) \geq \sum_{i=0}^D \Big\lceil\big|W_i(\theta)\big|\Big\rceil \] where $D$ is the diameter of $G$ and $W_i(\theta)$ is the sum of $f^\theta$-values of vertices at distance $i$ from any given vertex. The present author considers bilinear forms graphs $\mathrm{Bil}_q(n,m)$: these are the graphs with the $m\times n$ matrices over $\mathbb{F}_q$ as its vertices and whose edges are the unordered pairs $AB$ whose difference $A-B$ has rank 1. The author proves constructively that $\mathrm{Bil}_q(n,m)$ has eigenfunctions $f^\theta$ that meet the bound above when $D = 2$ but that no eigenfunctions meet this bound when $D \geq 3$.