Localization of spectral Turán-type theorems

Let $G$ be a graph, and let $v$ and $e$ be a vertex and an edge of $G$, respectively. Define $c(v)$ (resp. $c(e)$) to be the order of the largest clique in $G$ containing $v$ (resp. $e$). Denote the adjacency eigenvalues of $G$ by ${\lambda }_1\ge \cdots \ge {\lambda }_n$. We study localized refinements of spectral Turán-type theorems by replacing global parameters such as the clique number $\omega (G)$, size $m$ and order $n$ of $G$ with local quantities $c(v)$ and $c(e)$. Motivated by a conjecture of Elphick, Linz and Wocjan (2024), we first propose a vertex-localized strengthening of Wilf’s inequality: $$\sqrt{s^{+}(G)}\le \sum _{v\in V(G)}(1-\frac{1}{c(v)}),$$ where $s^{+}(G)={\sum }_{{\lambda }_i>0}{\lambda }_i^2$. Inspired by the Bollobás-Nikiforov conjecture (2007) on the first two eigenvalues, we then introduce an edge-localized analogue: $${\lambda }_1^2(G)+{\lambda }_2^2(G)\le \sum _{e\in E(G)}2(1-\frac{1}{c(e)})\mathrm{.}$$ As evidence of their validity, we verify the above conjectures for diamond-free graphs and random graphs. We also propose strengthening of the spectral versions of the Erdős, Stone and Simonovits Theorem by replacing the spectral radius with $\sqrt{s^{+}(G)}$ and establish it for all $F$-free graphs with $\chi (F)=3$. A key ingredient in our proofs is a general upper bound relating $\sqrt{s^{+}(G)}$ to the triangle count $t(G)$. Finally, we prove a localized version of Nikiforov’s walk inequality and conjecture a stronger localized version. These results contribute to the broader program of localizing spectral extremal inequalities.