English

Inversion diameter and treewidth

Combinatorics 2026-05-27 v4

Abstract

In an oriented graph G\overrightarrow{G}, the inversion of a subset XX of vertices is the operation that reverses the orientation of all arcs with both end-vertices in XX. The inversion graph of a graph GG, denoted by I(G)\mathcal{I}(G), is the graph whose vertices are orientations of GG in which two orientations G1\overrightarrow{G_1} and G2\overrightarrow{G_2} are adjacent if and only if there is an inversion transforming G1\overrightarrow{G_1} into G2\overrightarrow{G_2}.The inversion diameter of a graph GG is the diameter of its inversion graph I(G)\mathcal{I}(G), denoted by diam(I(G))\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{I}(G)).Havet, H\"orsch, and Rambaud~(2024) first proved that for GG of treewidth kk, diam(I(G))2k\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{I}(G)) \le 2k, and that there are graphs of treewidth kk with inversion diameter k+2k+2.In this paper, we construct graphs of treewidth kk with inversion diameter 2k2k, which implies that the previous upper bound diam(I(G))2k\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{I}(G)) \le 2k is tight.Moreover, for graphs with maximum degree Δ\Delta, Havet, H\"orsch, and Rambaud~(2024) proved diam(I(G))2Δ1\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{I}(G)) \le 2\Delta-1 and conjectured that diam(I(G))Δ\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{I}(G)) \le \Delta. We prove the conjecture when Δ=3\Delta=3 with the help of computer calculations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.15384,
  title  = {Inversion diameter and treewidth},
  author = {Yichen Wang and Haozhe Wang and Yuxuan Yang and Mei Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.15384},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:49:07.859Z