Compact compatible topologies for graphs with small cycles (Q2576017)

Summary: A topology \(\tau\) on the vertices of a comparability graph \(G\) is said to be compatible with \(G\) if each subgraph \(H\) of \(G\) is graph-connected if and only if it is a connected subspace of \((G,\tau)\). In two previous papers we considered the problem of finding compatible topologies for a given comparability graph and we proved that the nonexistence of infinite paths was a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a compact compatible topology on a tree (that is to say, a connected graph without cycles) and we asked whether this condition characterized the existence of a compact compatible topology on a comparability graph in which all cycles are of length at most \(n\). Here we prove an extension of the above-mentioned theorem to graphs whose cycles are all of length at most five and we show that this is the best possible result by exhibiting a comparability graph in which all cycles are of length 6, with no infinite paths, but which has no compact compatible topology.