The relation between equiangular sets of lines in the real space and distance-regular double covers of the complete graph is well known and studied since the work of Seidel and others in the 70's. The main topic of this paper is to continue the study on how complex equiangular lines relate to distance-regular covers of the complete graph with larger index. Given a set of equiangular lines meeting the relative (or Welch) bound, we show that if the entries of the corresponding Gram matrix are prime roots of unity, then these lines can be used to construct an antipodal distance-regular graph of diameter three. We also study in detail how the absolute (or Gerzon) bound for a set of equiangular lines can be used to derive bounds of the parameters of abelian distanceregular covers of the complete graph.

Pretty good state transfer in networks of qubits occurs when a continuous-time quantum walk allows the transmission of a qubit state from one node of the network to another, with fidelity arbitrarily close to 1. We prove that in a Heisenberg chain with n qubits there is pretty good state transfer between the nodes at the j-th and (n − j + 1)-th position if n is a power of 2. Moreover, this condition is also necessary for j = 1. We obtain this result by applying a theorem due to Kronecker about Diophantine approximations, together with techniques from algebraic graph theory.

We consider the representation of a continuous-time quantum walk in a graph X by the matrix exp(−itA(X)). We provide necessary and sufficient criteria for distance-regular graphs and, more generally, for graphs in association schemes to have perfect state transfer. Using these conditions, we provide several new examples of perfect state transfer in simple graphs.

We consider a system of qubits coupled via nearest-neighbour interaction governed by the Heisenberg Hamiltonian. We further suppose that all coupling constants are equal to 1. We are interested in determining which graphs allow for a transfer of quantum state with fidelity equal to 1. To answer this question, it is enough to consider the action of the Laplacian matrix of the graph in a vector space of suitable dimension.Our main result is that if the underlying graph is a tree with more than two vertices, then perfect state transfer does not happen. We also explore related questions, such as what happens in bipartite graphs and graphs with an odd number of spanning trees. Finally, we consider the model based on the XY -Hamiltonian, whose action is equivalent to the action of the adjacency matrix of the graph. In this case, we conjecture that perfect state transfer does not happen in trees with more than three vertices. *

This paper generalizes and unifies the existing spectral bounds on the k-independence number of a graph, which is the maximum size of a set of vertices at pairwise distance greater than k. The previous bounds known in the literature follow as a corollary of the main results in this work. We show that for most cases our bounds outperform the previous known bounds. Some infinite graphs where the bounds are tight are also presented. Finally, as a byproduct, we derive some lower spectral bounds for the diameter of a graph.