A uniform approach to complexes arising from forests (Q1010828)

The authors introduce the notion of grape and use this concept to study some simplicial complexes associated to forests. They obtain in this way new proofs of results that were already known as well as new results. If a simplicial complex \(\Delta\) is a grape, then each connected component of \(\Delta\) is either contractible or homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres. The authors show that the independence complexes, the dominance complexes, the matching complexes, the edge covering complexes and the edge dominance complexes of forests are examples of grapes. In particular, all these complexes are contractible or homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres.