Semitotal domination in claw-free cubic graphs (Q5915777)

\textit{W. Goddard} et al. [Util. Math. 94, 67--81 (2014; Zbl 1300.05220)] introduced semitotal domination in graphs. Let \(V(G)\) be the vertex set of a graph \(G\) containing no isolated vertices. A set \(S \subseteq V(G)\) is called a semitotal dominating set of \(G\) if each vertex not in \(S\) is adjacent to a vertex in \(S\), and each vertex in \(S\) is at distance at most two from another vertex of \(S\). The semitotal domination number of \(G\), denoted by \(\gamma_{t2}(G)\), is the minimum cardinality over all semitotal dominating sets of \(G\). For \(i\in\{1,2\}\), let \(D_i\) be a complete graph of order \(4\) minus one edge; let \(V(D_i)=\{a_i, b_i, c_i, d_i\}\) and let \(a_ib_i\) be the missing edge in \(D_i\). We denote by \(N_2\) the graph obtained from the disjoint union of \(D_1\) and \(D_2\) by adding two edges \(a_1b_2\) and \(a_2b_1\), and we denote by \(K_4\) the complete graph on \(4\) vertices. \textit{M. A. Henning} and \textit{A. J. Marcon} [Ann. Comb. 20, No. 4, 799--813 (2016; Zbl 1354.05107)] showed that, if \(G\) is a connected claw-free cubic graph of order \(n \geq 10\), then \(\gamma_{t2}(G) \leq \frac{4n}{11}\), and they posed the following conjecture. (C1) If \(G \not\in \{K_4, N_2\}\) is a connected claw-free cubic graph of order \(n\), then \(\gamma_{t2}(G) \leq \frac{n}{3}\). In this paper, the authors prove the above conjecture (C1), and they propose the following conjecture. (C2) If \(G \not\in \{K_4, N_2\}\) is a connected claw-free graph of order \(n\) with minimum degree at least \(3\), then \(\gamma_{t2}(G) \leq \frac{n}{3}\).