Resonance graphs of catacondensed even ring systems

Abstract

A catacondensed even ring system (shortly CERS) is a simple bipartite 2-connected outerplanar graph with all vertices of degree 2 or 3. In this paper, we investigate the resonance graphs (also called $Z$-transformation graphs) of CERS and firstly show that two even ring chains are resonantly equivalent iff their resonance graphs are isomorphic. As the main result, we characterize CERS whose resonance graphs are daisy cubes. In this way, we greatly generalize the result known for kinky benzenoid graphs. Finally, some open problems are also presented.