English

On well-covered Cartesian products

Combinatorics 2017-03-28 v1

Abstract

In 1970, Plummer defined a well-covered graph to be a graph GG in which all maximal independent sets are in fact maximum. Later Hartnell and Rall showed that if the Cartesian product GHG \Box H is well-covered, then at least one of GG or HH is well-covered. In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying all well-covered Cartesian products. In particular, we show that if the Cartesian product of two nontrivial, connected graphs of girth at least 44 is well-covered, then at least one of the graphs is K2K_2. Moreover, we show that K2K2K_2 \Box K_2 and C5K2C_5 \Box K_2 are the only well-covered Cartesian products of nontrivial, connected graphs of girth at least 55.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.08716,
  title  = {On well-covered Cartesian products},
  author = {Bert L. Hartnell and Douglas F. Rall and Kirsti Wash},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.08716},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

12 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:56:50.573Z