Chromatic roots of a ring of four cliques

Abstract

For any positive integers a, b, c, d, let Ra,b,c,d be the graph obtained from the complete graphs Ka,Kb,Kc and Kd by adding edges joining every vertex in Ka and Kc to every vertex in Kb and Kd. This paper shows that for arbitrary positive integers a, b, c and d, every root of the chromatic polynomial of Ra,b,c,d is either a real number or a non-real number with its real part equal to (a + b + c + d − 1)/2.