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Consider the family of graphs of degree $6$ with vertex set $V_n=(a, b, c)$ for all $0\leq a, b, c \leq n-1$ with $(a,b,c)$ being connected to $(a-1, b, c),(a+1, b,c), (a, b-1, c), (a, b+1, c), (a,b,c-1), (a,b, c+1)$, with all operations modulo $n$. Show that this is not a family of expander graphs.

I've been struggling with this question for over a week. I tried looking at from the algebraic perspective and show that the spectral gap is getting smaller as n(the number of vertexes) rise. But I got stuck a long the way and now I don't know if I'm on the right track at all.

Discrete lizard
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midnight44
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1 Answers1

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Given $n$, consider the set of vertices $S = \{ (a,b,c) : c < n/2 \} \subseteq V_n$. Assuming for simplicity that $n$ is even, this set contains exactly half the vertices. An edge connects $x \in S$ to $y \notin S$ iff $x = (a,b,n/2-1)$ and $y = (a,b,n/2)$, for a total of $n^2$ edges. Therefore the expansion of $S$ is $|E(S,\overline{S})|/|S| = n^2/(n^3/2) = 1/n$, which converges to zero.

Yuval Filmus
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