,
Felicia Lucke
,
Daniël Paulusma
,
Bernard Ries
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
The (Perfect) Matching Cut problem is to decide if a connected graph has a (perfect) matching that is also an edge cut. The Disconnected Perfect Matching problem is to decide if a connected graph has a perfect matching that contains a matching cut. Both Matching Cut and Disconnected Perfect Matching are NP-complete for planar graphs of girth 5, whereas Perfect Matching Cut is known to be NP-complete even for subcubic bipartite graphs of arbitrarily large fixed girth. We prove that Matching Cut and Disconnected Perfect Matching are also NP-complete for bipartite graphs of arbitrarily large fixed girth and bounded maximum degree. Our result for Matching Cut resolves a 20-year old open problem. We also show that the more general problem d-Cut, for every fixed d ≥ 1, is NP-complete for bipartite graphs of arbitrarily large fixed girth and bounded maximum degree. Furthermore, we show that Matching Cut, Perfect Matching Cut and Disconnected Perfect Matching are NP-complete for H-free graphs whenever H contains a connected component with two vertices of degree at least 3. Afterwards, we update the state-of-the-art summaries for H-free graphs and compare them with each other, and with a known and full classification of the Maximum Matching Cut problem, which is to determine a largest matching cut of a graph G. Finally, by combining existing results, we obtain a complete complexity classification of Perfect Matching Cut for H-subgraph-free graphs where H is any finite set of graphs.
@InProceedings{feghali_et_al:LIPIcs.ISAAC.2023.31,
author = {Feghali, Carl and Lucke, Felicia and Paulusma, Dani\"{e}l and Ries, Bernard},
title = {{Matching Cuts in Graphs of High Girth and H-Free Graphs}},
booktitle = {34th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2023)},
pages = {31:1--31:16},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-289-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2023},
volume = {283},
editor = {Iwata, Satoru and Kakimura, Naonori},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2023.31},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-193332},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2023.31},
annote = {Keywords: matching cut, perfect matching, girth, H-free graph}
}