Let $G$ be a graph and let Pm$(G)$ denote the number of perfect matchings of $G$. We denote the path with $m$ vertices by $P_m$ and the Cartesian product of graphs $G$ and $H$ by $G\times H$. In this paper, as the continuance of our paper [19], we enumerate perfect matchings in a type of Cartesian products of graphs by the Pfaffian method, which was discovered by Kasteleyn. Here are some of our results: 1. Let $T$ be a tree and let $C_n$ denote the cycle with $n$ vertices. Then Pm$(C_4\times T)=\prod (2+α^2)$, where the product ranges over all eigenvalues $α$ of $T$. Moreover, we prove that Pm$(C_4\times T)$ is always a square or double a square. 2. Let $T$ be a tree. Then Pm$(P_4\times T)=\prod (1+3α^2+α^4)$, where the product ranges over all non-negative eigenvalues $α$ of $T$. 3. Let $T$ be a tree with a perfect matching. Then Pm$(P_3\times T)=\prod (2+α^2),$ where the product ranges over all positive eigenvalues $α$ of $T$. Moreover, we prove that Pm$(C_4\times T)=[{Pm}(P_3\times T)]^2$.
We study the structure of a minimum dominating set of $C_{2n+1}^n$, the Cartesian product of $n$ copies of the cycle of size $2n+1$, where $2n+1$ is a prime.
We compute 2-enumerations of certain halved alternating sign matrices. In one case the enumeration equals the number of perfect matchings of a halved Aztec diamond. In the other case the enumeration equals the number of perfect matchings of a halved fortress graph. Our results prove three conjectures by Jim Propp.
A connected planar cubic graph is called an $m$-barrel fullerene and denoted by $F(m,k)$, if it has the following structure: The first circle is an $m$-gon. Then $m$-gon is bounded by $m$ pentagons. After that we have additional k layers of hexagons. At the last circle $m$-pentagons connected to the second $m$-gon. In this paper we asymptotically count by two different methods the number of perfect matchings in $m$-barrel fullerene graphs, as the number of hexagonal layers is large, and show that the results are equal.
We enumerate all dissections of an equilateral triangle into smaller equilateral triangles up to size 20, where each triangle has integer side lengths. A perfect dissection has no two triangles of the same side, counting up- and down-oriented triangles as different. We computationally prove W. T. Tutte's conjecture that the smallest perfect dissection has size 15 and we find all perfect dissections up to size 20.
A pairing of a graph $G$ is a perfect matching of the complete graph having the same vertex set as $G$. If every pairing of $G$ can be extended to a Hamiltonian cycle of the underlying complete graph using only edges from $G$, then $G$ has the PH-property. A somewhat weaker property is the PMH-property, whereby every perfect matching of $G$ can be extended to a Hamiltonian cycle of $G$. In an attempt to characterise all 4-regular graphs having the PH-property, we answer a question made in 2015 by Alahmadi et al. by showing that the Cartesian product $C_p\square C_q$ of two cycles on $p$ and $q…
The strong matching preclusion number of a graph, introduced by Park and Ihm in 2011, is the minimum number of vertices and edges whose deletion results in a graph that has neither perfect matchings nor almost perfect matchings. As a generalization, the fractional strong matching preclusion number of a graph is the minimum number of edges and vertices whose deletion leaves the resulting graph without a fractional perfect matching. In this paper, we obtain the fractional strong matching preclusion number for Cartesian product graphs. As an application, the fractional strong matching preclusion …
This work develops a methodical approach to counting of walks on cartesian products, biproducts, symmetric and exterior powers and bipowers, Schur operations, coverings and semicoverings of weighted graphs. For weight and root lattices of semisimple Lie algebras, this approach allows us to compute various combinatorial and representation-theoretical constants, in particular, the number of plane symplectic wave graphs with given number of vertices.
This document is an exposition of an assortment of open problems arising from the exact enumeration of (perfect) matchings of finite graphs. Roughly half have been solved at the time of this writing; see the document "Twenty Open Problems in Enumeration of Matchings: Progress Report" (also available from this server as math.CO/9801061). NOTE: This article has now been superseded by math.CO/9904150.
In this paper, an upper bound for the perfect Italian domination number of the cartesian product of any two graphs is obtained and the exact value of this parameter for cartesian product of some special graphs are obtained. We have also proved that for any two positive integers $a$, $b$ there exists a graph $G$ and an induced subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that $γ_I^p(G) = a$ and $γ_I^p(H) = b$. Relationship of the perfect Italian domination number with the Roman domination number and the perfect domination number of a graph $G$ are obtained and the corresponding realization problems are also solved…
In the last decade there have been many results about special families of graphs whose number of perfect matchings is given by perfect or near perfect powers. In this paper we present an approach that allows proving them in a unified way. We use this approach to prove a conjecture of James Propp stating that the number of tilings of the so-called Aztec dungeon regions is a power (or twice a power) of 13. We also prove a conjecture of Matt Blum stating that the number of perfect matchings of a certain family of subgraphs of the square lattice is a power of 3 or twice a power of 3. In addition w…
Evolutionary models used for describing molecular sequence variation suppose that at a non-recombining genomic segment, sequences share ancestry that can be represented as a genealogy--a rooted, binary, timed tree, with tips corresponding to individual sequences. Under the infinitely-many-sites mutation model, mutations are randomly superimposed along the branches of the genealogy, so that every mutation occurs at a chromosomal site that has not previously mutated; if a mutation occurs at an interior branch, then all individuals descending from that branch carry the mutation. The implication i…
MacMahon enumerated the plane partitions in an $a \times b \times c$ box. These are in bijection to lozenge tilings of a hexagon, to certain perfect matchings, and to families of non-intersecting lattice paths. In this work we consider more general regions, called triangular regions, and establish signed versions of the latter three bijections. Indeed, we use perfect matchings and families of non-intersecting lattice paths to define two signs of a lozenge tiling. A combinatorial argument involving a new method, called resolution of a puncture, then shows that the signs are in fact equivalent. …
We compute the number of perfect matchings of an $M\times N$ Aztec rectangle where $|N-M|$ vertices have been removed along a line. A particular case solves a problem posed by Propp. Our enumeration results follow from certain identities for Schur functions, which are established by the combinatorics of nonintersecting lattice paths.
A perfect structure is a triple $(M,P,S)$ of matrices $M, P$ and $S$ of consistent sizes such that $MP = PS$. Perfect structures comprise similar matrices, eigenvectors, perfect colorings (equitable partitions) and graph coverings. In this paper we study general algebraic properties of perfect structures and characterize all perfect structures with identity or unity matrix $M$. Next, we consider a graph product generalizing most standard products (e.g. Cartesian, tensor, normal, lexicographic graph products). For this product we propose a construction of perfect structures and prove that it ca…
We report the results of a computer enumeration that found that there are 3155 perfect 1-factorisations (P1Fs) of the complete graph $K_{16}$. Of these, 89 have a non-trivial automorphism group (correcting an earlier claim of 88 by Meszka and Rosa). We also (i) describe a new invariant which distinguishes between the P1Fs of $K_{16}$, (ii) observe that the new P1Fs produce no atomic Latin squares of order 15 and (iii) record P1Fs for a number of large orders that exceed prime powers by one.
It is well-known that plane partitions, lozenge tilings of a hexagon, perfect matchings on a honeycomb graph, and families of non-intersecting lattice paths in a hexagon are all in bijection. In this work we consider regions that are more general than hexagons. They are obtained by further removing upward-pointing triangles. We call the resulting shapes triangular regions. We establish signed versions of the latter three bijections for triangular regions. We first investigate the tileability of triangular regions by lozenges. Then we use perfect matchings and families of non-intersecting latti…
In this paper, we build on recent results by Chauve et al. (2014) and Bahrani and Lumbroso (2017), which combined the split-decomposition, as exposed by Gioan and Paul, with analytic combinatorics, to produce new enumerative results on graphs---in particular the enumeration of several subclasses of perfect graphs (distance-hereditary, 3-leaf power, ptolemaic). Our goal was to study a simple family of graphs, of which the split-decomposition trees have prime nodes drawn from an enumerable (and manageable!) set of graphs. Cactus graphs, which we describe in more detail further down in this paper…
A matching preclusion set of a graph is an edge set whose deletion results in a graph without perfect matching or almost perfect matching. The Cartesian product of $n$ paths is called an $n$-grid graph. In this paper, we study the matching preclusion problems for $n$-grid graphs and obtain the following results. If an $n$-grid graph has an even order, then it has the matching preclusion number $n$, and every optimal matching preclusion set is trivial. If the $n$-grid graph has an odd order, then it has the matching preclusion number $n+1$, and all the optimal matching preclusion sets are chara…
The 1970s conjecture of Lovász and Plummer that the number of perfect matchings in any $3$-regular graph is exponential in the number of vertices was proved in 2011 by Esperet, Kardoš, King, Král', and Norine. We give the exact formula for the number of perfect matchings in two families of $3$-regular graphs. In the graph consisting of a $2n$-cycle with diametric chords (also known as the Möbius ladder $M_n$ and a Harary graph) and in the cartesian product of the cycle $C_n$ with an edge (called the cycle prism), the number of matchings is the sum of the Fibonacci numbers $F_{n-1}$ and $F_{n+1…
A graph G is said to be 1-perfectly orientable (1-p.o. for short) if it admits an orientation such that the out-neighborhood of every vertex is a clique in G. The class of 1-p.o. graphs forms a common generalization of the classes of chordal and circular arc graphs. Even though 1-p.o. graphs can be recognized in polynomial time, no structural characterization of 1-p.o. graphs is known. In this paper we consider the four standard graph products: the Cartesian product, the strong product, the direct product, and the lexicographic product. For each of them, we characterize when a nontrivial produ…
A graph $G$ with a perfect matching is called saturated if $G+e$ has more perfect matchings than $G$ for any edge $e$ that is not in $G$. Lovász gave a characterization of the saturated graphs called the cathedral theorem, with some applications to the enumeration problem of perfect matchings, and later Szigeti gave another proof. In this paper, we give a new proof with our preceding works which revealed canonical structures of general graphs with perfect matchings. Here, the cathedral theorem is derived in quite a natural way, providing more refined or generalized properties. Moreover, the ne…
Let $G$ be a graph with adjacency matrix $A$. The transition matrix of $G$ relative to $A$ is defined by $H_{A}(t):=\exp{(-itA)},\;t\in\Rl$. We say that the graph $G$ admits perfect state transfer between the verteices $u$ and $v$ at $τ\in\Rl$ if the $uv$-th entry of $H_{A}(τ)$ has unit modulus. Perfect state transfer is a rare phenomena so we consider an approximation called pretty good state transfer. We find that NEPS (Non-complete Extended P-Sum) of the path on three vertices with basis containing tuples with hamming weights of both parities do not exhibit perfect state transfer. But these…
In this article, Temperley's bijection between spanning trees of the square grid on the one hand, and perfect matchings (also known as dimer coverings) of the square grid on the other, is extended to the setting of general planar directed (and undirected) graphs, where edges carry nonnegative weights that induce a weighting on the set of spanning trees. We show that the weighted, directed spanning trees (often called arborescences) of any planar graph G can be put into a one-to-one weight-preserving correspondence with the perfect matchings of a related planar graph H. One special case of this…
We consider the game of Cops and Robber played on the Cartesian product of two trees. Assuming the players play perfectly, it is shown that if there are two cops in the game, then the length of the game (known as the 2-capture time of the graph) is equal to half the diameter of the graph. In particular, the 2-capture time of the m x n grid is proved to be floor ((m+n-2)/2).
The enumeration of perfect matchings of graphs is equivalent to the dimer problem which has applications in statistical physics. A graph $G$ is said to be $n$-rotation symmetric if the cyclic group of order $n$ is a subgroup of the automorphism group of $G$. Jockusch (Perfect matchings and perfect squares, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, 67(1994), 100-115) and Kuperberg (An exploration of the permanent-determinant method, Electron. J. Combin., 5(1998), #46) proved independently that if $G$ is a plane bipartite graph of order $N$ with $2n$-rotation symmetry, then the number of perfect matchings of $G…
In this work a combinatorial approach towards the weak Lefschetz property is developed that relates this property to enumerations of signed perfect matchings as well as to enumerations of signed families of non-intersecting lattice paths in certain triangular regions. This connection is used to study Artinian quotients by monomial ideals of a three-dimensional polynomial ring. Extending a main result in the recent memoir [Boij, Migliore, Miró-Roig, Nagel, Zanello], we completely classify the quotients of type two that have the weak Lefschetz property in characteristic zero. We also derive resu…
We propose new families of graphs which exhibit quantum perfect state transfer. Our constructions are based on the join operator on graphs, its circulant generalizations, and the Cartesian product of graphs. We build upon the results of Bašić et al \cite{bps09,bp09} and construct new integral circulants and regular graphs with perfect state transfer. More specifically, we show that the integral circulant $\textsc{ICG}_{n}(\{2,n/2^{b}\} \cup Q)$ has perfect state transfer, where $b \in \{1,2\}$, $n$ is a multiple of 16 and $Q$ is a subset of the odd divisors of $n$. Using the standard join of g…
Let $G$ be a graph without isolated vertices. The total domination number of $G$ is the minimum number of vertices that can dominate all vertices in $G$, and the paired domination number of $G$ is the minimum number of vertices in a dominating set whose induced subgraph contains a perfect matching. This paper determines the total domination number and the paired domination number of the toroidal meshes, i.e., the Cartesian product of two cycles $C_n$ and $C_m$ for any $n\ge 3$ and $m\in\{3,4\}$, and gives some upper bounds for $n, m\ge 5$.
We introduce a class of graphs called compound graphs, generalizing rectangles, which are constructed out of copies of a planar bipartite base graph. The main result is that the number of perfect matchings of every compound graph is divisible by the number of matchings of its base graph. Our approach is to use Kasteleyn's theorem to prove a key lemma, from which the divisibility theorem follows combinatorially. This theorem is then applied to provide a proof of Problem 21 of Propp's Enumeration of Matchings, a divisibility property of rectangles. Finally, we present a new proof, in the same sp…
We study enumerations of Dyck and ballot tilings, which are tilings of a region determined by two Dyck or ballot paths. We give bijective proofs to two formulae of enumerations of Dyck tilings through Hermite histories. We show that one of the formulae is equal to a certain Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomial. For a ballot tiling, we establish formulae which are analogues of formulae for Dyck tilings. Especially, the generating functions have factorized expressions. The key tool is a planted plane tree and its increasing labellings. We also introduce a generalized perfect matching which is bijective t…
We describe new constructions of graphs which exhibit perfect state transfer on continuous-time quantum walks. Our constructions are based on variants of the double cones [BCMS09,ANOPRT10,ANOPRT09] and the Cartesian graph products (which includes the n-cube) [CDDEKL05]. Some of our results include: (1) If $G$ is a graph with perfect state transfer at time $t_{G}$, where $t_{G}\Spec(G) \subseteq \ZZπ$, and $H$ is a circulant with odd eigenvalues, their weak product $G \times H$ has perfect state transfer. Also, if $H$ is a regular graph with perfect state transfer at time $t_{H}$ and $G$ is a g…
In this article, we study directed graphs (digraphs) with a coloring constraint due to Von Neumann and related to Nim-type games. This is equivalent to the notion of kernels of digraphs, which appears in numerous fields of research such as game theory, complexity theory, artificial intelligence (default logic, argumentation in multi-agent systems), 0-1 laws in monadic second order logic, combinatorics (perfect graphs)... Kernels of digraphs lead to numerous difficult questions (in the sense of NP-completeness, #P-completeness). However, we show here that it is possible to use a generating func…
Let $G$ be a graph with an even number of vertices. The matching preclusion number of $G$, denoted by $mp(G)$, is the minimum number of edges whose deletion leaves the resulting graph without a perfect matching. We introduced a $0$-$1$ linear programming which can be used to find matching preclusion number of graphs. In this paper, by relaxing of the $0$-$1$ linear programming we obtain a linear programming and call its optimal objective value as fractional matching preclusion number of graph $G$, denoted by $mp_f(G)$. We show $mp_f(G)$ can be computed in polynomial time for any graph $G$. By …
In this paper we give a graph theoretic combinatorial interpretation for the cluster variables that arise in most cluster algebras of finite type. In particular, we provide a family of graphs such that a weighted enumeration of their perfect matchings encodes the numerator of the associated Laurent polynomial while decompositions of the graphs correspond to the denominator. This complements recent work by Schiffler and Carroll-Price for a cluster expansion formula for the A_n case while providing a novel interpretation for the B_n, C_n, and D_n cases.
For a graph $G$ and a related symmetric matrix $M$, the continuous-time quantum walk on $G$ relative to $M$ is defined as the unitary matrix $U(t) = \exp(-itM)$, where $t$ varies over the reals. Perfect state transfer occurs between vertices $u$ and $v$ at time $τ$ if the $(u,v)$-entry of $U(τ)$ has unit magnitude. This paper studies quantum walks relative to graph Laplacians. Some main observations include the following closure properties for perfect state transfer: (1) If a $n$-vertex graph has perfect state transfer at time $τ$ relative to the Laplacian, then so does its complement if $nτ$ …
Let $G$ be a graph of even order and let $K_{G}$ be the complete graph on the same vertex set of $G$. A pairing of a graph $G$ is a perfect matching of the graph $K_{G}$. A graph $G$ has the Pairing-Hamiltonian property (for short, the PH-property) if for each one of its pairings, there exists a perfect matching of $G$ such that the union of the two gives rise to a Hamiltonian cycle of $K_G$. In 2015, Alahmadi \emph{et al.} gave a complete characterisation of the cubic graphs having the PH-property. Most naturally, the next step is to characterise the quartic graphs that have the PH-property. …
