English

Square-free Word-representation of Word-representable Graphs

Combinatorics 2026-01-29 v1

Abstract

A graph G=(V,E)G = (V, E) is word-representable, if there exists a word w over the alphabet V such that for letters x,yV{x, y} \in V , xx and yy alternate in ww if and only if xyExy \in E. In this paper, we prove that any non-empty word-representable graph can be represented by a word containing no non-trivial squares. This result provides a positive answer to the open problem present in the book Words and graphs written by Sergey Kitaev, and Vadim Lozin. Also, we prove that for a word-representable graph GG, if the representation number of GG is kk, then every kk-uniform word representing the graph GG is also square-free. Moreover, we prove that every minimal-length word representing a graph is square-free. Then, we count the number of possible square-free word-representations of a complete graph. At last, using the infinite square-free string generated from the Thue-Morse sequence, we prove that infinitely many square-free words represent a non-complete connected word-representable graph.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.14426,
  title  = {Square-free Word-representation of Word-representable Graphs},
  author = {Biswajit Das and Ramesh Hariharasubramanian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.14426},
  year   = {2026}
}

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12 pages