The line graph of a tree and its edge ideal

Abstract

We describe all the trees with the property that the corresponding edge ideal of their line graph has a linear resolution. As a consequence, we give a complete characterization of those trees $T$ for which the line graph $L(T)$ is co-chordal. We also compute the second Betti number of the edge ideal of $L(T)$ and we determine the number of cycles in $\overline{L(T)}$. As a consequence, we obtain also the first Zagreb index of a graph. For edge ideals of line graphs of caterpillar graphs we determine the Krull dimension, the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity, and the projective dimension under some additional assumption on the degrees of the cutpoints.