Algebraic number-theoretic properties of graph and matroid polynomials

PhDThis thesis is an investigation into the algebraic number-theoretical properties of certain polynomial invariants of graphs and matroids. The bulk of the work concerns chromatic polynomials of graphs, and was motivated by two conjectures proposed during a 2008 Newton Institute workshop on combinatorics and statistical mechanics. The first of these predicts that, given any algebraic integer, there is some natural number such that the sum of the two is the zero of a chromatic polynomial (chromatic root); the second that every positive integer multiple of a chromatic root is also a chromatic root. We compute general formulae for the chromatic polynomials of two large families of graphs, and use these to provide partial proofs of each of these conjectures. We also investigate certain correspondences between the abstract structure of graphs and the splitting fields of their chromatic polynomials. The final chapter concerns the much more general multivariate Tutte polynomials—or Potts model partition functions—of matroids. We give three separate proofs that the Galois group of every such polynomial is a direct product of symmetric groups, and conjecture that an analogous result holds for the classical bivariate Tutte polynomial

On Brenti's conjecture about the log-concavity of the chromatic polynomial

The chromatic polynomial is a well studied object in graph theory. There are many results and conjectures about the log-concavity of the chromatic polynomial and other polynomials related to it. The location of the roots of these polynomials has also been well studied. One famous result due to A. Sokal and C. Borgs provides a bound on the absolute value of the roots of the chromatic polynomial in terms of the highest degree of the graph. We use this result to prove a modification of a log-concavity conjecture due to F. Brenti. The original conjecture of Brenti was that the chromatic polynomial is log-concave on the natural numbers. This was disproved by Paul Seymour by presenting a counter example. We show that the chromatic polynomial $P_G(q)$ of graph $G$ is in fact log-concave for all $q > C\Delta + 1$ for an explicit constant $C < 10$, where $\Delta$ denotes the highest degree of $G$. We also provide an example which shows that the result is not true for constants $C$ smaller than 1

Chromatic roots and limits of dense graphs

In this short note we observe that recent results of Abert and Hubai and of Csikvari and Frenkel about Benjamini--Schramm continuity of the holomorphic moments of the roots of the chromatic polynomial extend to the theory of dense graph sequences. We offer a number of problems and conjectures motivated by this observation.Comment: 9 page