Finding a sun in building-free graphs Elaine M. Eschen ∗ Ch´ınh T. Ho`ang † Jeremy P. Spinrad ‡ R. Sritharan § November 21, 2018 Abstract Deciding whether an arbitrary graph contains a sun was recently shown to be NP-complete [10]. We show that whether a building-free graph contains a sun can be decided in O(min{mn3,m1.5n2}) time and, if a sun exists, it can be found in the same time bound. The class of building-free graphs contains many interesting classes of perfect graphs such as Meyniel graphs which, in turn, contains classes such as hhd- free graphs, i-triangulated graphs, and parity graphs. Moreover, there are imperfect graphs that are building-free. The class of building- free graphs generalizes several classes of graphs for which an efficient test for the presence of a sun is known. We also present a vertex elimination scheme for the class of (building, gem)-free graphs. The class of (building, gem)-free graphs is a generalization of the class of distance hereditary graphs and a restriction of the class of (building, sun)-free graphs. 1 Introduction arXiv:0910.1808v1 [cs.DM] 9 Oct 2009 For a fixed graph F, we say a graph G is F-free if it does not contain F as an induced subgraph. For a set S of graphs, we say a graph G is S-free if it ∗
[email protected], Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506. Acknowledges support from NSF WV EPSCoR. †
[email protected], Department of Physics and Computer Science, Wilfrid Laurier Uni- versity, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada.