The spectral characterization of graphs of index less than 2 with no path as a component

A graph is said to be determined by the adjacency and Laplacian spectrum (or to be a DS graph, for short) if there is no other non-isomorphic graph with the same adjacency and Laplacian spectrum, respectively. It is known that connected graphs of index less than 2 are determined by their adjacency spectrum. In this paper, we focus on the problem of characterization of DS graphs of index less than 2. First, we give various infinite families of cospectral graphs with respect to the adjacency matrix. Subsequently, the results will be used to characterize all DS graphs (with respect to the adjacency matrix) of index less than 2 with no path as a component. Moreover, we show that most of these graphs are DS with respect to the Laplacian matrix.