Domination versus edge domination on claw-free graphs (Q6162036)

A dominating set of a graph \(G\) is a subset of the vertex of \(G\) such that every vertex outside the subset is adjacent to at least one vertex in the subset. The domination number \(\gamma(G)\) of \(G\) is the minimum size of a dominating set of \(G\). An edge-dominating set of \(G\) is a subset of the edge set of \(G\) such that every edge outside the subset is incident to at least one edge in the subset. The edge-domination number \(\gamma_{e}(G)\) of \(G\) is the minimum size of an edge-dominating set of \(G\). Note that \(\gamma_{e}(G)\) is equal to the minimum size of a maximal matching in \(G\). In general, the domination number and edge-domination number of a graph are not comparable. However, in [Discrete Appl. Math. 285, 343--349 (2020; Zbl 1466.05155)], \textit{J. Baste} et al. conjectured that the inequality \(\gamma(G) \le \gamma_{e}(G)\) holds for any \(d\)-regular graph \(G\) with \(d \ge 1\), and they proved that this is true for cubic claw-free graphs, where a graph is called claw-free if it does not contain the complete bipartite graph \(K_{1,3}\) as an induced subgraph. In this paper under review, the authors generalize this result by proving that the inequality \(\gamma(G) \le \gamma_{e}(G)\) holds for any claw-free graph \(G\) with minimum degree at least \(2\).