Construction of fullerenes and Pogorelov polytopes with 5-, 6- and one 7-gonal face (Q1657010)

Summary: A Pogorelov polytope is a combinatorial simple 3-polytope realizable in the Lobachevsky (hyperbolic) space as a bounded right-angled polytope. These polytopes are exactly simple 3-polytopes with cyclically 5-edge connected graphs. A Pogorelov polytope has no 3- and 4-gons and may have any prescribed numbers of \(k\)-gons, \(k \geq 7\). Any simple polytope with only 5-, 6- and at most one 7-gon is Pogorelov. For any other prescribed numbers of \(k\)-gons, \(k \geq 7\), we give an explicit construction of a Pogorelov and a non-Pogorelov polytope. Any Pogorelov polytope different from \(k\)-barrels (also known as Löbel polytopes, whose graphs are biladders on \(2 k\) vertices) can be constructed from the 5- or the 6-barrel by cutting off pairs of adjacent edges and connected sums with the 5-barrel along a 5-gon with the intermediate polytopes being Pogorelov. For fullerenes, there is a stronger result. Any fullerene different from the 5-barrel and the \((5, 0)\)-nanotubes can be constructed by only cutting off adjacent edges from the 6-barrel with all the intermediate polytopes having 5-, 6- and at most one additional 7-gon adjacent to a 5-gon. This result cannot be literally extended to the latter class of polytopes. We prove that it becomes valid if we additionally allow connected sums with the 5-barrel and 3 new operations, which are compositions of cutting off adjacent edges. We generalize this result to the case when the 7-gon may be isolated from 5-gons.