Analogous to cliques for (m,n)-colored mixed graphs

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of 'cliques' in the context of (m,n)-colored mixed graphs, extending the idea of graph homomorphisms and chromatic numbers to signed and switchable signed graphs, revealing their complex structure.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized notion of cliques for signed and switchable signed graphs, expanding the understanding of graph homomorphisms and chromatic properties in these types.

Findings

Characterization of 'cliques' in signed graphs

Analysis of switchable signed graph properties

Extension of chromatic number concepts to complex graph types

Abstract

Vertex coloring of a graph $G$ with $n$-colors can be equivalently thought to be a graph homomorphism (edge preserving vertex mapping) of $G$ to the complete graph $K_n$ of order $n$. So, in that sense, the chromatic number $\chi(G)$ of $G$ will be the order of the smallest complete graph to which $G$ admits a homomorphism to. As every graph, which is not a complete graph, admits a homomorphism to a smaller complete graph, we can redefine the chromatic number $\chi(G)$ of $G$ to be the order of the smallest graph to which $G$ admits a homomorphism to. Of course, such a smallest graph must be a complete graph as they are the only graphs with chromatic number equal to their order. The concept of vertex coloring can be generalize for other types of graphs. Naturally, the chromatic number is defined to be the order of the smallest graph (of the same type) to which a graph admits homomorphism to. The analogous notion of clique turns out to be the graphs with order equal to their (so defined) "chromatic number". These "cliques" turns out to be much more complicated than their undirected counterpart and are interesting objects of study. In this article, we mainly study different aspects of "cliques" for signed (graphs with positive or negative signs assigned to each edge) and switchable signed graphs (equivalence class of signed graph with respect to switching signs of edges incident to the same vertex).