On Almost Well-Covered Graphs of Girth at Least 6

We consider a relaxation of the concept of well-covered graphs, which are graphs with all maximal independent sets of the same size. The extent to which a graph fails to be well-covered can be measured by its independence gap, defined as the difference between the maximum and minimum sizes of a maximal independent set in $G$. While the well-covered graphs are exactly the graphs of independence gap zero, we investigate in this paper graphs of independence gap one, which we also call almost well-covered graphs. Previous works due to Finbow et al. (1994) and Barbosa et al. (2013) have implications for the structure of almost well-covered graphs of girth at least $k$ for $k\in \{7,8\}$. We focus on almost well-covered graphs of girth at least $6$. We show that every graph in this class has at most two vertices each of which is adjacent to exactly $2$ leaves. We give efficiently testable characterizations of almost well-covered graphs of girth at least $6$ having exactly one or exactly two such vertices. Building on these results, we develop a polynomial-time recognition algorithm of almost well-covered $\{C_3,C_4,C_5,C_7\}$-free graphs

Vertex decomposable graphs, codismantlability, Cohen-Macaulayness and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity

We call a (simple) graph G codismantlable if either it has no edges or else it has a codominated vertex x, meaning that the closed neighborhood of x contains that of one of its neighbor, such that G-x codismantlable. We prove that if G is well-covered and it lacks induced cycles of length four, five and seven, than the vertex decomposability, codismantlability and Cohen-Macaulayness for G are all equivalent. The rest deals with the computation of Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of codismantlable graphs. Note that our approach complements and unifies many of the earlier results on bipartite, chordal and very well-covered graphs

Disproving the normal graph conjecture

A graph $G$ is called normal if there exist two coverings, $\mathbb{C}$ and $\mathbb{S}$ of its vertex set such that every member of $\mathbb{C}$ induces a clique in $G$, every member of $\mathbb{S}$ induces an independent set in $G$ and $C \cap S \neq \emptyset$ for every $C \in \mathbb{C}$ and $S \in \mathbb{S}$. It has been conjectured by De Simone and K\"orner in 1999 that a graph $G$ is normal if $G$ does not contain $C_5$, $C_7$ and $\overline{C_7}$ as an induced subgraph. We disprove this conjecture

Dynamical properties of profinite actions

We study profinite actions of residually finite groups in terms of weak containment. We show that two strongly ergodic profinite actions of a group are weakly equivalent if and only if they are isomorphic. This allows us to construct continuum many pairwise weakly inequivalent free actions of a large class of groups, including free groups and linear groups with property (T). We also prove that for chains of subgroups of finite index, Lubotzky's property ($\tau$) is inherited when taking the intersection with a fixed subgroup of finite index. That this is not true for families of subgroups in general leads to answering the question of Lubotzky and Zuk, whether for families of subgroups, property ($\tau$) is inherited to the lattice of subgroups generated by the family. On the other hand, we show that for families of normal subgroups of finite index, the above intersection property does hold. In fact, one can give explicite estimates on how the spectral gap changes when passing to the intersection. Our results also have an interesting graph theoretical consequence that does not use the language of groups. Namely, we show that an expander covering tower of finite regular graphs is either bipartite or stays bounded away from being bipartite in the normalized edge distance.Comment: Corrections made based on the referee's comment

Bounds for identifying codes in terms of degree parameters

An identifying code is a subset of vertices of a graph such that each vertex is uniquely determined by its neighbourhood within the identifying code. If \M(G) denotes the minimum size of an identifying code of a graph $G$, it was conjectured by F. Foucaud, R. Klasing, A. Kosowski and A. Raspaud that there exists a constant $c$ such that if a connected graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and maximum degree $d$ admits an identifying code, then \M(G)\leq n-\tfrac{n}{d}+c. We use probabilistic tools to show that for any $d\geq 3$, \M(G)\leq n-\tfrac{n}{\Theta(d)} holds for a large class of graphs containing, among others, all regular graphs and all graphs of bounded clique number. This settles the conjecture (up to constants) for these classes of graphs. In the general case, we prove \M(G)\leq n-\tfrac{n}{\Theta(d^{3})}. In a second part, we prove that in any graph $G$ of minimum degree $\delta$ and girth at least 5, \M(G)\leq(1+o_\delta(1))\tfrac{3\log\delta}{2\delta}n. Using the former result, we give sharp estimates for the size of the minimum identifying code of random $d$-regular graphs, which is about $\tfrac{\log d}{d}n$