Fractional Zero Forcing via Three-color Forcing Games

An $r$-fold analogue of the positive semidefinite zero forcing process that is carried out on the $r$-blowup of a graph is introduced and used to define the fractional positive semidefinite forcing number. Properties of the graph blowup when colored with a fractional positive semidefinite forcing set are examined and used to define a three-color forcing game that directly computes the fractional positive semidefinite forcing number of a graph. We develop a fractional parameter based on the standard zero forcing process and it is shown that this parameter is exactly the skew zero forcing number with a three-color approach. This approach and an algorithm are used to characterize graphs whose skew zero forcing number equals zero.Comment: 24 page

Zero Forcing Sets and Bipartite Circulants

In this paper we introduce a class of regular bipartite graphs whose biadjacency matrices are circulant matrices and we describe some of their properties. Notably, we compute upper and lower bounds for the zero forcing number for such a graph based only on the parameters that describe its biadjacency matrix. The main results of the paper characterize the bipartite circulant graphs that achieve equality in the lower bound.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figure