Forbidden branches in trees with minimal atom-bond connectivity index
arXiv:1706.08680 · doi:10.1016/j.amc.2017.06.014
Abstract
The atom-bond connectivity (ABC) index has been, in recent years, one of the most actively studied vertex-degree-based graph invariants in chemical graph theory. For a given graph , the ABC index is defined as , where is the degree of vertex in and denotes the set of edges of . In this paper we present some new structural properties of trees with a minimal ABC index (also refer to as a minimal-ABC tree), which is a step further towards understanding their complete characterization. We show that a minimal-ABC tree cannot simultaneously contain a -branch and or -branches.