New results on the energy of integral circulant graphs

Circulant graphs are an important class of interconnection networks in parallel and distributed computing. Integral circulant graphs play an important role in modeling quantum spin networks supporting the perfect state transfer as well. The integral circulant graph ICGn(D) has the vertex set Zn = {0, 1, 2, … , n − 1} and vertices a and b are adjacent if gcd(a − b, n) ∈ D, where D ⊆ {d : d∣n, 1 ⩽ d < n}. These graphs are highly symmetric, have integral spectra and some remarkable properties connecting chemical graph theory and number theory. The energy of a graph was first defined by Gutman, as the sum of the absolute values of the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix. Recently, there was a vast research for the pairs and families of non-cospectral graphs having equal energies. Following Bapat and Pati [R.B. Bapat, S. Pati, Energy of a graph is never an odd integer, Bull. Kerala Math. Assoc. 1 (2004) 129–132], we characterize the energy of integral circulant graph modulo 4. Furthermore, we establish some general closed form expressions for the energy of integral circulant graphs and generalize some results from Ilić [A. Ilić, The energy of unitary Cayley graphs, Linear Algebra Appl. 431 (2009), 1881–1889]. We close the paper by proposing some open problems and characterizing extremal graphs with minimal energy among integral circulant graphs with n vertices, provided n is even.