Punctured adjacency-degree algebras of Cartesian products

Abstract

For a connected regular graph G and a vertex a, we study the algebra generated by the adjacency and degree matrices of G-a and its cyclic module P_a generated by the all-ones vector. Our main theorem determines dim P_a for Cartesian products whose factors have equitable distance partitions at the chosen roots. A normalized logarithmic derivative of the local spectral generating function partitions the factors into boundary classes. We identify the boundary-return space exactly and express dim P_a as a sum of affine ranks on additive spectral fibres. For a distance-regular factor with distinct spectrum Θ, this gives dim P_a(F^{\square m}) = |mΘ| - 1. For products of powers of two distinct complete graphs, we evaluate the fibre formula in closed form. We also determine the full punctured algebras of all Hamming graphs: equality with the compressed Terwilliger algebra holds precisely in dimensions at most four for the hypercube and at most two for larger alphabets. For distance-regular graphs, adjacency moments alone determine the intersection array, with an explicit finite reconstruction. Finally, Cartesian stabilizer formulas separate metric loss from orbit splitting; on Doob graphs their distance-graded defect recovers the number of Shrikhande factors.