English

Optimal pebbling number of graphs with given minimum degree

Combinatorics 2018-04-12 v1

Abstract

Consider a distribution of pebbles on a connected graph GG. A pebbling move removes two pebbles from a vertex and places one to an adjacent vertex. A vertex is reachable under a pebbling distribution if it has a pebble after the application of a sequence of pebbling moves. The optimal pebbling number π(G)\pi^*(G) is the smallest number of pebbles which we can distribute in such a way that each vertex is reachable. It was known that the optimal pebbling number of any connected graph is at most 4nδ+1\frac{4n}{\delta+1}, where δ\delta is the minimum degree of the graph. We strengthen this bound by showing that equality cannot be attained and that the bound is sharp. If diam(G)3\operatorname{diam}(G)\geq 3 then we further improve the bound to π(G)3.75nδ+1\pi^*(G)\leq\frac{3.75n}{\delta+1}. On the other hand, we show that for arbitrary large diameter and any ϵ>0\epsilon>0 there are infinitely many graphs whose optimal pebbling number is bigger than (83ϵ)n(δ+1)\left(\frac{8}{3}-\epsilon\right)\frac{n}{(\delta+1)}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.03717,
  title  = {Optimal pebbling number of graphs with given minimum degree},
  author = {Andrzej Czygrinow and Glenn Hurlbert and Gyula Y. Katona and László F. Papp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03717},
  year   = {2018}
}