English

The independence polynomial of trees is not always log-concave starting from order 26

Combinatorics 2023-08-21 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

An independent set in a graph is a collection of vertices that are not adjacent to each other. The cardinality of the largest independent set in GG is represented by α(G)\alpha(G). The independence polynomial of a graph G=(V,E)G = (V, E) was introduced by Gutman and Harary in 1983 and is defined as I(G;x)=k=0α(G)skxk=s0+s1x+s2x2+...+sα(G)xα(G), I(G;x) = \sum_{k=0}^{\alpha(G)}{s_k}x^{k}={s_0}+{s_1}x+{s_2}x^{2}+...+{s_{\alpha(G)}}x^{\alpha(G)}, where sks_k represents the number of independent sets in GG of size kk. The conjecture made by Alavi, Malde, Schwenk, and Erd\"os in 1987 stated that the independence polynomials of trees are unimodal, and many researchers believed that this conjecture could be strengthened up to its corresponding log-concave version. However, in our paper, we present evidence that contradicts this assumption by introducing infinite families of trees whose independence polynomials are not log-concave.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.01784,
  title  = {The independence polynomial of trees is not always log-concave starting from order 26},
  author = {Ohr Kadrawi and Vadim E. Levit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.01784},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

25 pages, 10 figures