On the roots of independence polynomials of almost all very well-covered graphs (Q2473044)

A graph \(G\) is very well-covered if it has no isolated vertices, its order equals twice the maximum size of a stable set and if it is well-covered, i.e., all its maximal independent sets are of the same size. For instance, appending a single pendant edge to each vertex of \(G\) yields a very well-covered graph, denoted by \(G^\ast\). Let \(I(G;x)\) denote the independence polynomial of \(G\), i.e., \(I(G;x) = \sum_{k=0}^{\alpha(G)} s_k x^k\) where \(s_k\) denotes the number of stable sets of cardinality \(k\) in \(G\) and \(\alpha(G)\) denotes the maximum size of a stable set in \(G\). In this paper, the authors establish formulae connecting the coefficients of \(I(G;x)\) and \(I(G^\ast;x)\), which allows them to show that the number of roots of \(I(G;x)\) is equal to the number of roots of \(I(G^\ast; x)\) different from \(-1\), which appears as a root of multiplicity \(\alpha(G^\ast) - \alpha(G)\) for \(I(G^\ast;x)\). They also prove that the real roots of \(I(G^\ast;x)\) are in \([-1,-1/2\alpha(G^\ast))\), while for a general graph of order \(n\) they show that the roots lie in \(| z| >1/(2n-1)\). The authors also demonstrate that the independence polynomial distinguishes well-covered spiders \((K_{1,n}^\ast, n\geq1)\) among well-covered trees.