Open Neighborhood Ideals of Well-Totally Dominated Trees are Cohen-Macaulay

Abstract

We introduce and investigate the open neighborhood ideal $\mathcal{N}(G)$ of a finite simple graph $G$. We describe the minimal primary decomposition of $\mathcal{N}(G)$ in terms of the minimal total dominating sets (TDSs) of $G$. Then we prove that the open neighborhood ideal of a tree is Cohen-Macaulay if and only if the tree is well-totally dominated (WTD) and calculate the Cohen-Macaulay type.