Graphs with the Erdos-Ko-Rado property

Abstract

For a graph G and integer r \geq 1 we denote the family of independent r-sets of V(G) by I^{(r)}(G). A graph G is said to be r-EKR if no intersecting subfamily of I^{(r)}(G) is larger than the largest such family all of whose members contain some fixed v \in V(G). If this inequality is always strict, then G is said to be strictly r-EKR. We show that if a graph G is r-EKR then its lexicographic product with any complete graph is r-EKR. For any graph G, we define \mu(G) to be the minimum size of a maximal independent vertex set. We conjecture that, if 1 \leq r \leq 1/2\mu(G), then G is r-EKR, and if r<1/2\mu(G), then G is strictly r-EKR. This is known to be true when G is an empty graph, a cycle, a path or the disjoint union of complete graphs. We show that it is also true when G is the disjoint union of a pair of complete multipartite graphs.