Decompositions of the free product of graphs

Abstract

We study the free product of rooted graphs and its various decompositions using quantum probabilistic methods. We show that the free product of rooted graphs is canonically associated with free independence, which completes the proof of the conjecture that there exists a product of rooted graphs canonically associated with each notion of noncommutative independence which arises in the axiomatic theory. Using the `orthogonal product' of rooted graphs, we decompose the branches of the free product of rooted graphs as `alternating orthogonal products'. This leads to alternating decompositions of the free product itself, with the star product or the comb product followed by orthogonal products. These decompositions correspond to the recently studied decompositions of the free additive convolution of probability measures in terms boolean and orthogonal convolutions, or monotone and orthogonal convolutions. We also introduce a new type of `quantum decomposition' of the free product of graphs, where the distance partition of the set of vertices is taken with respect to a set of vertices instead of a single vertex. We show that even in the case of widely studied graphs this yields new and more complete information on their spectral properties, like spectral measures of a (usually infinite) set of cyclic vectors under the action of the adjacency matrix.