The complexity of the vertex-minor problem

Abstract

A graph H is a vertex-minor of a graph G if it can be reached from G by the successive application of local complementations and vertex deletions. Vertex-minors have been the subject of intense study in graph theory over the last decades and have found applications in other fields such as quantum information theory. Therefore it is natural to consider the computational complexity of deciding whether a given graph G has a vertex-minor isomorphic to another graph H, which was previously unknown. Here we prove that this decision problem is NP-complete, even when restricting H, G to be circle graphs, a class of graphs that has a natural relation to vertex-minors.