Edge-local equivalence of graphs

Abstract

The local complement G*i of a simple graph G at one of its vertices i is obtained by complementing the subgraph induced by the neighborhood of i and leaving the rest of the graph unchanged. If e={i,j} is an edge of G then G*e=((G*i)*j)*i is called the edge-local complement of G along the edge e. We call two graphs edge-locally equivalent if they are related by a sequence of edge-local complementations. The main result of this paper is an algebraic description of edge-local equivalence of graphs in terms of linear fractional transformations of adjacency matrices. Applications of this result include (i) a polynomial algorithm to recognize whether two graphs are edge-locally equivalent, (ii) a formula to count the number of graphs in a class of edge-local equivalence, and (iii) a result concerning the coefficients of the interlace polynomial, where we show that these coefficients are all even for a class of graphs; this class contains, as a subset, all strongly regular graphs with parameters (n, k, a, c), where k is odd and a and c are even.