Dans cette thèse nous étudions le groupe quantique d’automorphismes des graphes finis, introduit par Banica et Bichon. Dans un premier temps nous montrerons un théorème de structure du groupe quantique d’automorphismes du produit lexicographique de deux graphes finis réguliers, qui généralise un résultat classique de Sabidussi. Ce théorème donne une condition nécessaire et suffisante pour que ce groupe quantique s’exprime comme le produit en couronne libre des groupes quantiques d’automorphismes de ces deux graphes. Dans un deuxième temps, nous expliciterons certaines améliorations de résultats de Banica, Bichon et Chenevier permettant d’obtenir des critères de non symétrie quantique sur les graphes, à l’aide des outils développés par les auteurs susmentionnés.Enfin, pour poursuivre ces recherches, nous développerons une autre méthode utilisant la dualité de Tannaka-Krein et inspirée de l’étude des groupes quantiques compacts orthogonaux par Banica et Speicher. Celle-ci nous permettra, à l’aide d’une étude orbitale approfondie des graphes sommets-transitifs, d’énoncer une condition suffisante pour qu’un graphe ait des symétries quantiques ; condition qui a vocation à être aussi nécessaire mais ceci reste une conjecture à ce stade. / In this thesis we study the quantum automorphism group of finite graphs, introduces by Banica and Bichon. First we will prove a theorem about the structure of the quantum automorphism group of the lexicographic product of two finite regular graphs. It is a quantum generalization of a classical result of Sabidussi. This theorem gives a necessary and sufficient condition for this quantum group to be discribe as the free wreath product of the quantum automorphism groups of these two graphs. Then, we will give some improvement of Banica, Bichon and Chenevier results, to obtain a quantum non-symmetry criteria on graphs, using tools developped by the above authors. Finally, to continue this research, we will describe another method using Tannaka-Krein duality and inspired by the study of orthogonal compact groups by Banica and Speicher. This will enable us, with a thorough orbital study of vertex-transitive graphs, to state a sufficient condition for a graph to have quantum symmetries ; condition which is intended to be also necessary but this remains conjecture at this point.

The minimum number of colors required to color the edges of a graph so that any two distinct vertices are connected by at least one path in which no two edges are colored the same is called its rainbow connection number. This graph parameter was introduced by Chartrand et al. in 2008. The problem has garnered considerable interest and several variants of the initial version have since been introduced. The rainbow connection number of a connected graph G is denoted by rc(G). It can be shown that the rainbow connection number of a tree on n vertices is n -1. Hence |G|-1 is an upper bound for rc(G)of any non-trivial graph G. For all non-trivial, bridge-less and connected graphs G, Basavaraju etal. Showed that rc(G) can be upper-bounded by a quadratic function of its radius. In addition they also proved the tightness of the bound. It is clear that we cannot hope to get an upper-bound better than |G| - 1 in the case of graphs with bridges. An immediate and natural question is the following: Are there classes of bridge-less graphs whose rainbow connection numbers are linear functions of their radii? This question is of particular interest since the diameter is a trivial lower bound for rc(G). We answer in affirmative to the above question. In particular we studied three (graph) product operations (Cartesian, Lexicographic and Strong) and the graph powering operation. We were able to show that the rainbow connection number of the graph resulting from any of the above graph operations is upper-bounded by 2r(G)+c, where r(G) is radius of the resultant graph and c ε {0, 1, 2}.