Characteristic polynomials of skew-adjacency matrices of oriented graphs (Q640406)

An oriented graph \(G^\sigma \) is a simple undirected graph \(G\) with an orientation, which assigns to each edge a direction so that \(G^\sigma \) becomes a directed graph. \(G\) is called the underlying graph of \(G^\sigma \) and we denote by \(S(G^\sigma )\) the skew-adjacency matrix of \(G^\sigma \) and its spectrum \(Sp(G^\sigma )\) is called the skew-spectrum of \(G^\sigma \). For the concept of the skew-energy of a simple directed graph see [\textit{C. Adiga}, \textit{R. Balakrishnan}, and \textit{W. So}, ``The skew energy of a digraph,'' Linear Algebra Appl. 432, No.\,7, 1825--1835 (2010; Zbl 1217.05131)], which gave the motivation for this paper. Here the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of the skew-adjacency matrix \(S(G^\sigma )\) are given in terms of \(G^\sigma \) and as its applications, new combinatorial proofs of known results are obtained and new families of oriented bipartite graphs \(G^\sigma \) with \(Sp(G^\sigma ) = \mathbf iSp(G)\) are given.