The Facial Common Neighbourhood Graph

TL;DR

This paper studies the planarity and properties of common neighbourhood graphs derived from polyhedra, introducing a new face-based graph concept and solving extremal problems related to planarity and face length.

Contribution

It introduces the facecon(G) graph for polyhedra, generalizes the radial graph, and characterizes extremal polyhedra with respect to planarity and face length constraints.

Findings

Con(G) planarity depends on the number of odd faces in cubic polyhedra.

For non-cubic polyhedra, Con(G) is always non-planar.

Facecon(G) is maximal planar only if G has faces of length at most 6.

Abstract

Given a polyhedron (planar, $3$-connected graph) $G$, we investigate its common neighbourhood graph con($G$). For cubic ($3$-regular) polyhedra, we show that the planarity of con($G$) depends on the number of odd faces of $G$, and on their adjacency. We then prove that for all other polyhedra, con($G$) is non-planar. We introduce a novel concept for polyhedra (and more generally, for plane graphs) $G$, namely the `facial common neighbourhood graph' facecon($G$). Its definition takes into account pairs of vertices with a common neighbour on the same face of $G$. It is a spanning subgraph of con($G$), that coincides with con($G$) for cubic polyhedra. It also generalises the reverse construction of the radial graph. As part of our investigation, we also prove a technical result of independent interest: if a maximal planar graph (triangulation of the sphere) has exactly two vertices of odd degree, then they are not adjacent. We also answer several questions in extremal graph theory. Fixing the number of vertices, we characterise the polyhedra $G$ such that con($G$) is planar and the number of edges in con($G$) is minimal/maximal. We address the same problem for facecon($G$), and prove that if it is maximal planar, then $G$ has no face of length greater than $6$. We notably characterise and explicitly construct all polyhedra $G$ of maximal face length $4$ such that facecon($G$) is maximal planar.