Several extreme coefficients of the Tutte polynomial of graphs

Abstract

Let $t_{i,j}$ be the coefficient of $x^iy^j$ in the Tutte polynomial $T(G;x,y)$ of a connected bridgeless and loopless graph $G$ with order $n$ and size $m$. It is trivial that $t_{0,m-n+1}=1$ and $t_{n-1,0}=1$. In this paper, we obtain expressions of another eight extreme coefficients $t_{i,j}$'s with $(i,j)=(0,m-n)$,$(0,m-n-1)$,$(n-2,0)$,$(n-3,0)$,$(1,m-n)$,$(1,m-n-1)$,$(n-2,1)$ and $(n-3,1)$ in terms of small substructures of $G$. Among them, the former four can be obtained by using coefficients of the highest, second highest and third highest terms of chromatic or flow polynomials, and vice versa. We also discuss their duality property and their specializations to extreme coefficients of the Jones polynomial.