Strongly regular graph, strongly polynomial sequences, and two-level polynomials

Source abstract

We study the behavior of the characteristic and chromatic polynomials of certain families of graphs and their relation to homomorphism counts, focusing on polynomial dependence of the coefficients at each fixed codegree on the graph family parameter. We prove that the characteristic polynomials of strongly regular graphs with polynomial parameters form a two-level polynomial of infinite depth in the sense of Bogart and Woods. In contrast, the chromatic polynomials of Paley graphs have maximal constant depth two: their coefficient of codegree three is not eventually polynomial in the number of vertices. We also prove that both the chromatic and characteristic polynomials of every strongly polynomial graph sequence, in the sense of de La Harpe and Jaeger, have infinite depth. Finally, we investigate homomorphism counts between two strongly polynomial graph sequences. We show that infinite depth need not hold in general, but we construct target sequences for which it holds for every strongly polynomial source sequence.