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Hom complexes and homotopy theory in the category of graphs
We investigate a notion of -homotopy of graph maps that is based on
the internal hom associated to the categorical product in the category of
graphs. It is shown that graph -homotopy is characterized by the
topological properties of the \Hom complex, a functorial way to assign a
poset (and hence topological space) to a pair of graphs; \Hom complexes were
introduced by Lov\'{a}sz and further studied by Babson and Kozlov to give
topological bounds on chromatic number. Along the way, we also establish some
structural properties of \Hom complexes involving products and exponentials
of graphs, as well as a symmetry result which can be used to reprove a theorem
of Kozlov involving foldings of graphs. Graph -homotopy naturally leads
to a notion of homotopy equivalence which we show has several equivalent
characterizations. We apply the notions of -homotopy equivalence to the
class of dismantlable graphs to get a list of conditions that again
characterize these. We end with a discussion of graph homotopies arising from
other internal homs, including the construction of `-theory' associated to
the cartesian product in the category of reflexive graphs.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, final version, to be published in European J.
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