Partial duality and closed 2-cell embeddings To Adrian Bondy on his 70th birthday M. N. Ellingham1;3 Department of Mathematics, 1326 Stevenson Center Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37240, U.S.A.
[email protected] Xiaoya Zha2;3 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Box 34 Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132, U.S.A.
[email protected] April 28, 2016; to appear in Journal of Combinatorics Abstract In 2009 Chmutov introduced the idea of partial duality for embeddings of graphs in surfaces. We discuss some alternative descriptions of partial duality, which demonstrate the symmetry between vertices and faces. One is in terms of band decompositions, and the other is in terms of the gem (graph-encoded map) representation of an embedding. We then use these to investigate when a partial dual is a closed 2-cell embedding, in which every face is bounded by a cycle in the graph. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for a partial dual to be closed 2-cell, and also a sufficient condition for no partial dual to be closed 2-cell. 1 Introduction In this paper a surface Σ means a connected compact 2-manifold without boundary. By an open or closed disk in Σ we mean a subset of the surface homeomorphic to such a subset of R2. By a simple closed curve or circle in Σ we mean an image of a circle in R2 under a continuous injective map; a simple arc is a similar image of [0; 1]. The closure of a set S is denoted S, and the boundary is denoted @S.