A solution to the combinatorial puzzle of Mayer's virial expansion (Q747600)

\textit{J. E. Mayer} and \textit{M. Goeppert Mayer} [Statistical mechanics. New York, J. Wiley and Sons, London, Chapman and Hall (1940; JFM 66.1175.01)] established important connections between generating functions of weighted graphs and expansions in statistical mechanics. The second main theorem of the mentioned work in the context of a classical gas model allowed to write the coefficients of the virial expansion of pressure in terms of weighted two-connected graphs. \textit{G. Labelle} et al. [Sémin. Lothar. Comb. 54, B54m, 40 p. (2005; Zbl 1188.82007)] studied the graph weights arising from the one-dimensional hard-core gas model and noticed that the sum of these weights over all two-connected graphs with \(n\) vertices is \(-n(n-2)!\). In the present paper, the author gives a purely combinatorial proof of this observation, and extends the proof of \textit{O. Bernardi} [Sémin. Lothar. Comb. 59, B59e, 10 p. (2007; Zbl 1193.05012)] for the two-connected graph case.