3-regular digraphs with optimum skew energy (Q649548)

Let \(D\) be a digraph obtained from a simple undirected graph by assigning a direction to each of its edges, with the skew adjacency matrix \(S\), indexed by the vertices of \(D\), satisfying \(S(i,j)=1\) if an edge \(ij\) is oriented from \(i\) towards \(j\), \(-1\) if it is oriented from \(j\) towards \(i\), and 0 if there is no edge between \(i\) and \(j\). The authors interpret the entries of the powers of skew adjacency matrix via the numbers of walks in \(D\), very much in analogy to the standard result on the entries of the powers of the adjacency matrix. Next, it has been shown by \textit{C. Adiga, R. Balakrishnan} and \textit{W. So} [Linear Algebra Appl. 432, No. 7, 1825--1835 (2010; Zbl 1217.05131)] that the skew energy, defined as the sum of the absolute values of the eigenvalues of \(S\), is bounded from above by \(n\sqrt{\Delta}\) for a graph with \(n\) vertices and the maximum vertex degree \(\Delta\). In the paper under review, it is shown that the 3-regular digraphs with maximum skew energy are two particular orientations of the complete graph \(K_4\) and the hypercube \(Q_3\).