Composite planar coverings of graphs

Planar graphs; geometric and topological aspects of graph theory (05C10) Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.) (05C70) Structural characterization of families of graphs (05C75)

Review text

All graphs \(G= (V,E)\) considered in the present paper are simple and finite ones. A graph \(\widetilde G\) is called an (\(n\)-fold) covering of \(G\) with a projection \(p:\widetilde G\to G\) if there is an \(n\)-to-one surjection \(p: V(\widetilde G)\to V(G)\) which sends the neighbors of each \(v\in V(\widetilde G)\) bijectively to those in \(p(v)\). By an additional condition \(\widetilde G\) is defined to be a regular covering. In former papers the author investigated the relationship between planar 2-fold (or double) coverings and embeddings of graphs in the projective plane. These results (see Theorems 1 and 2) induced the following ``\(1-2-\infty\) conjecture or his ``planar cover conjecture: A connected graph is projection-planar if and only if it has a planar covering. Many papers around this conjecture exist in the literature, but the sufficiency is still open; and therefore the author presents a new aspect of coverings of graphs. Namely, an \(n\)-fold covering or a covering projection \(p:\widetilde G\to G\) is said to be \((n_1,n_2)\)-composite if there are an \(n_1\)-fold covering \(p_1: \widetilde G\to G'\) and an \(n_2\)-fold covering \(p_2: G'\to G\) with \(p= p_1p_2\), and hence \(n= n_1n_2\). And if \(n_1> 1\) and \(n_2> 1\) then the covering is said to be composite. The main results of the paper are the following theorems: Theorem 4. A connected graph \(G\) is projective-planar if and only if it has an \((n,2)\)-composite planar connected covering for some \(n\geq 1\). Theorem 5. Every planar connected regular covering of a nonplanar connected graph is \((n,2)\)-composite for some \(n\geq 1\). In connection with the proofs of these results some structural properties of coverings are given, for example Theorem 12: Every connected regular covering of a 3-connected graph is either 3-connected or a cyclic chain.

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