Closed neighborhood ideal of a graph (Q2192260)

The \textit{closed neighborhood ideal} of a simple graph is the square-free ideal of the polynomial ring on the vertices of the graph generated by the monomials obtained, from every vertex, by taking the product of the vertex with its neighbors. The \textit{dominating ideal} of the graph is the square-free monomial ideal generated by the product of the variables in the dominating sets of vertices of the graph (sets of vertices whose neighbor sets cover the vertex set of the graph). The article contains a study of height, big height, projective dimension and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of these ideals; providing formulas and bounds which involve some combinatorial invariants of the graph, prominently the matching number of the graph. The height and big height of the neighborhood ideal are equal to the minimum and the maximum size of a dominating set, respectively (Lemma 2.2). For a forest graph, it is proved that the regularity and the projective dimension of the quotient of the polynomial ring by the neighborhood ideal are both bounded below by the matching number of the graph (Theorem 2.5). For a path graph the heights of the neighbourhood and dominating ideals are computed explicitly in terms of the number of vertices, as are the projective dimension and the regularity in the case of the neighborhood ideal (Theorem 2.6). When the set of vertices of degree larger or equal to two that have no leaf neighbors is an independent set, the regularity of the quotient of the polynomial ring by the neighborhood ideal coincides with the matching number and, moreover, the projective dimension of the quotient and the big height of the ideal are equal to the number of vertices minus the matching number (Theorem 2.7). When the graph is either a generalized star graph (obtained by gluing together one end-point of each member of a finite family of paths) or an \(m\)-book graph (the Cartesian product of a star graph with \(m\) leaves with an edge), the regularity of the quotient of the polynomial ring by the neighborhood ideal is equal to the matching number (Theorems 2.8 and 2.9). Finally, for a complete multi-partite graph, Theorem 2.10 contains several formulas (involving the cardinalities of the part sets of the vertex set) for the height, Betti numbers, projective dimension and regularity, both in the neighborhood ideal and the dominating ideal cases.