English

Determining a graph from its reconfiguration graph

Combinatorics 2025-04-29 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Given a graph GG and a natural number kk, the kk-recolouring graph Ck(G)\mathcal{C}_k(G) is the graph whose vertices are the kk-colourings of GG and whose edges link pairs of colourings which differ at exactly one vertex of GG. Recently, Hogan et al. proved that GG can be determined from Ck(G)\mathcal{C}_k(G) provided kk is large enough (quadratic in the number of vertices of GG). We improve this bound by showing that k=χ(G)+1k=\chi(G)+1 colours suffice, and provide examples of families of graphs for which k=χ(G)k=\chi(G) colours do not suffice. We then extend this result to kk-Kempe-recolouring graphs, whose vertices are again the kk-colourings of a graph GG and whose edges link pairs of colourings which differ by swapping the two colours in a connected component induced by selecting those two colours. We show that k=χ(G)+2k=\chi(G)+2 colours suffice to determine GG in this case. Finally, we investigate the case of independent set reconfiguration, proving that in only a few trivial cases is one guaranteed to be able to determine a graph GG.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.19783,
  title  = {Determining a graph from its reconfiguration graph},
  author = {Gaétan Berthe and Caroline Brosse and Brian Hearn and Jan van den Heuvel and Pierre Hoppenot and Théo Pierron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19783},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:13:45.453Z