English

The complexity of the vertex-minor problem

Combinatorics 2019-06-14 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

A graph H is a vertex-minor of a graph G if it can be reached from G by the successive application of local complementations and vertex deletions. Vertex-minors have been the subject of intense study in graph theory over the last decades and have found applications in other fields such as quantum information theory. Therefore it is natural to consider the computational complexity of deciding whether a given graph G has a vertex-minor isomorphic to another graph H, which was previously unknown. Here we prove that this decision problem is NP-complete, even when restricting H, G to be circle graphs, a class of graphs that has a natural relation to vertex-minors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.05689,
  title  = {The complexity of the vertex-minor problem},
  author = {Axel Dahlberg and Jonas Helsen and Stephanie Wehner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05689},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1805.05306

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:52:46.241Z