Spheres and balls as independence complexes

Abstract

The terms "whiskering", and more generally "grafting", refer to adding generators to any monomial ideal to make the resulting ideal Cohen-Macaulay. We investigate the independence complexes of simplicial complexes that are constructed through a whiskering or grafting process, and we show that these independence complexes are (generalized) Bier balls. More specifically, the independence complexes are either homeomorphic to a ball or a sphere. In a related direction, we classify when the independence complexes of very well-covered graphs are homeomorphic to balls or spheres.