Resonance Graphs and Perfect Matchings of Graphs on Surfaces

Niko Tratnik, Dong Ye

Published 2017-10-02Version 1

Let $G$ be a graph embedded in a surface and let $\mathcal F$ be a set of even faces of $G$ (faces bounded by a cycle of even length). The resonance graph of $G$ with respect to $\mathcal F$, denoted by $R(G;\mathcal F)$, is a graph such that its vertex set is the set of all perfect matchings of $G$ and two vertices $M_1$ and $M_2$ are adjacent to each other if and only if the symmetric difference $M_1\oplus M_2$ is a cycle bounding some face in $\mathcal F$. It has been shown that if $G$ is a matching-covered plane bipartite graph, the resonance graph of $G$ with respect to the set of all inner faces is isomorphic to the covering graph of a distributive lattice. It is evident that the resonance graph of a plane graph $G$ with respect to an even-face set $\mathcal F$ may not be the covering graph of a distributive lattice. In this paper, we show the resonance graph of a graph $G$ on a surface with respect to a given even-face set $\mathcal F$ can always be embedded into a hypercube as an induced subgraph. Furthermore, we show that the Clar covering polynomial of $G$ with respect to $\mathcal F$ is equal to the cube polynomial of the resonance graph $R(G;\mathcal F)$, which generalizes previous results on some subfamilies of plane graphs.