Packings in bipartite prisms and hypercubes

Abstract

The $2$-packing number $\rho_2(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the cardinality of a largest $2$-packing of $G$ and the open packing number $\rho^{\rm o}(G)$ is the cardinality of a largest open packing of $G$, where an open packing (resp. $2$-packing) is a set of vertices in $G$ no two (closed) neighborhoods of which intersect. It is proved that if $G$ is bipartite, then $\rho^{\rm o}(G\Box K_2) = 2\rho_2(G)$. For hypercubes, the lower bounds $\rho_2(Q_n) \ge 2^{n - \lfloor \log n\rfloor -1}$ and $\rho^{\rm o}(Q_n) \ge 2^{n - \lfloor \log (n-1)\rfloor -1}$ are established. These findings are applied to injective colorings of hypercubes. In particular, it is demonstrated that $Q_9$ is the smallest hypercube which is not perfect injectively colorable. It is also proved that $\gamma_t(Q_{2^k}\times H) = 2^{2^k-k}\gamma_t(H)$, where $H$ is an arbitrary graph with no isolated vertices.