A Construction of Cospectral Graphs for the Normalized Laplacian

Abstract

We give a method to construct cospectral graphs for the normalized Laplacian by a local modification in some graphs with special structure. Namely, under some simple assumptions, we can replace a small bipartite graph with a cospectral mate without changing the spectrum of the entire graph. We also consider a related result for swapping out biregular bipartite graphs for the matrix $A+tD$.

We produce (exponentially) large families of non-bipartite, non-regular graphs which are mutually cospectral, and also give an example of a graph which is cospectral with its complement but is not self-complementary.