English

Finiteness of non-decomposable critically 4 and 5-frustrated signed graphs

Combinatorics 2026-03-13 v1

Abstract

A signed graph (G,σ)(G,\sigma) is a graph GG with a signature σ\sigma labeling each edge with a positive or negative sign. Two signatures of GG are switching equivalent if one is obtained from the other by changing the signs of all edges in an edge-cut. The frustration index of a signed graph (G,σ)(G, \sigma) is the minimum number of negative edges among all signatures equivalent to σ\sigma. A signed graph is critically kk-frustrated if it has frustration index kk, and the removal of any edge decreases its frustration index. A critically kk-frustrated signed graph is prime if it has no subdivided edge (including multiedge) and none of its subgraphs is the edge-disjoint union of critically frustrated signed graphs. Steffen and Naserasr et al. conjectured that for any positive integer kk, there are finitely many prime critically kk-frustrated signed graphs. The cases k=1,2,3k=1,2,3 have been proved to be true recently by Cappello et al.. In this paper, we show that the conjecture holds when k=4k=4 and 55.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.11883,
  title  = {Finiteness of non-decomposable critically 4 and 5-frustrated signed graphs},
  author = {Zhiqian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.11883},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17pages,10 figures