Clique-Stable Set separation in perfect graphs with no balanced skew-partitions

Inspired by a question of Yannakakis on the Vertex Packing polytope of perfect graphs, we study the Clique-Stable Set Separation in a non-hereditary subclass of perfect graphs. A cut (B,W) of G (a bipartition of V(G)) separates a clique K and a stable set S if $K\subseteq B$ and $S\subseteq W$. A Clique-Stable Set Separator is a family of cuts such that for every clique K, and for every stable set S disjoint from K, there exists a cut in the family that separates K and S. Given a class of graphs, the question is to know whether every graph of the class admits a Clique-Stable Set Separator containing only polynomially many cuts. It is open for the class of all graphs, and also for perfect graphs, which was Yannakakis' original question. Here we investigate on perfect graphs with no balanced skew-partition; the balanced skew-partition was introduced in the proof of the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem. Recently, Chudnovsky, Trotignon, Trunck and Vuskovic proved that forbidding this unfriendly decomposition permits to recursively decompose Berge graphs using 2-join and complement 2-join until reaching a basic graph, and they found an efficient combinatorial algorithm to color those graphs. We apply their decomposition result to prove that perfect graphs with no balanced skew-partition admit a quadratic-size Clique-Stable Set Separator, by taking advantage of the good behavior of 2-join with respect to this property. We then generalize this result and prove that the Strong Erdos-Hajnal property holds in this class, which means that every such graph has a linear-size biclique or complement biclique. This property does not hold for all perfect graphs (Fox 2006), and moreover when the Strong Erdos-Hajnal property holds in a hereditary class of graphs, then both the Erdos-Hajnal property and the polynomial Clique-Stable Set Separation hold.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1308.644

Complexity of colouring problems restricted to unichord-free and \{square,unichord\}-free graphs

A \emph{unichord} in a graph is an edge that is the unique chord of a cycle. A \emph{square} is an induced cycle on four vertices. A graph is \emph{unichord-free} if none of its edges is a unichord. We give a slight restatement of a known structure theorem for unichord-free graphs and use it to show that, with the only exception of the complete graph $K_4$, every square-free, unichord-free graph of maximum degree~3 can be total-coloured with four colours. Our proof can be turned into a polynomial time algorithm that actually outputs the colouring. This settles the class of square-free, unichord-free graphs as a class for which edge-colouring is NP-complete but total-colouring is polynomial

Strong arc decompositions of split digraphs

A {\bf strong arc decomposition} of a digraph $D=(V,A)$ is a partition of its arc set $A$ into two sets $A_1,A_2$ such that the digraph $D_i=(V,A_i)$ is strong for $i=1,2$. Bang-Jensen and Yeo (2004) conjectured that there is some $K$ such that every $K$-arc-strong digraph has a strong arc decomposition. They also proved that with one exception on 4 vertices every 2-arc-strong semicomplete digraph has a strong arc decomposition. Bang-Jensen and Huang (2010) extended this result to locally semicomplete digraphs by proving that every 2-arc-strong locally semicomplete digraph which is not the square of an even cycle has a strong arc decomposition. This implies that every 3-arc-strong locally semicomplete digraph has a strong arc decomposition. A {\bf split digraph} is a digraph whose underlying undirected graph is a split graph, meaning that its vertices can be partioned into a clique and an independent set. Equivalently, a split digraph is any digraph which can be obtained from a semicomplete digraph $D=(V,A)$ by adding a new set $V'$ of vertices and some arcs between $V'$ and $V$. In this paper we prove that every 3-arc-strong split digraph has a strong arc decomposition which can be found in polynomial time and we provide infinite classes of 2-strong split digraphs with no strong arc decomposition. We also pose a number of open problems on split digraphs