2-extendability of (4,5,6)-fullerenes

Abstract

A (4,5,6)-fullerene is a plane cubic graph whose faces are only quadrilaterals, pentagons and hexagons, which includes all (4,6)- and (5,6)-fullerenes. A connected graph $G$ with at least $2k+2$ vertices is $k$-extendable if $G$ has perfect matchings and any matching of size $k$ is contained in a perfect matching of $G$. We know that each (4,5,6)-fullerene graph is 1-extendable and at most 2-extendable. It is natural to wonder which (4,5,6)-fullerene graphs are 2-extendable. In this paper, we completely solve this problem (see Theorem 3.3): All non-2-extendable (4,5,6)-fullerenes consist of four sporadic (4,5,6)-fullerenes ($F_{12},F_{14},F_{18}$ and $F_{20}$) and five classes of (4,5,6)-fullerenes. As a surprising consequence, we find that all (4,5,6)-fullerenes with the anti-Kekulé number 3 are non-2-extendable. Further, there also always exists a non-2-extendable (4,5,6)-fullerene with arbitrarily even $n⩾10$ vertices.

28 pages,15 figures