On the clique behavior and Hellyness of the complements of regular graphs

Abstract

A collection of sets is intersecting, if any pair of sets in the collection has nonempty intersection. A collection of sets \(\mathcal{C}\) has the Helly property if any intersecting subcollection has nonempty intersection. A graph is /Helly/ if the collection of maximal complete subgraphs of \(G\) has the Helly property. We prove that if \(G\) is a \(k\)-regular graph with \(n\) vertices such that \(n>3k+\sqrt{2k^{2}-k}\), then the complement \(\bar{G}\) is not Helly. We also consider the problem of whether the properties of Hellyness and convergence under the clique graph operator are equivalent for the complement of \(k\)-regular graphs, for small values of \(k\).