Existence of Quantum Symmetries for Graphs on Up to Seven Vertices: A Computer based Approach

Abstract

The symmetries of a finite graph are described by its automorphism group; in the setting of Woronowicz's quantum groups, a notion of a quantum automorphism group has been defined by Banica capturing the quantum symmetries of the graph. In general, there are more quantum symmetries than symmetries and it is a non-trivial task to determine when this is the case for a given graph: The question is whether or not the associative algebra associated to the quantum automorphism group is commutative. We use noncommutative Gröbner bases in order to tackle this problem; the implementation uses Gap and Singular:Letterplace. We determine the existence of quantum symmetries for all connected, undirected graphs without multiple edges and without self-edges, for up to seven vertices. As an outcome, we infer within our regime that a classical automorphism group of order one or two is an obstruction for the existence of quantum symmetries.