1. The Clar-Fries mysteryJoshua Fenton, Jack Edward Graver, Elizabeth J. Hartung, 2026, original scientific article Abstract: A fullerene is a 3-regular plane graph whose faces are hexagons and pentagons. The Fries number of a fullerene is the largest number of benzene rings over all possible Kekulé structures while the Clar number of a fullerene is the largest number of independent benzene rings over all possible Kekulé structures. One question was whether it is always the case that a largest set of independent benzene rings, giving the Clar number, must be a subset of some largest set of benzene rings giving the Fries number. This question is still open for benzenoids, but was answered negatively for fullerenes, with the first counterexample given in paper from E. J. Hartung in 2014. In 2016 in paper from J. E. Graver and E. J. Hartung, the authors constructed a family of fullerenes with the property that the set of benzene rings giving the Clar number was actually disjoint from the set of benzene rings giving the Fries number. Fowler and Myrvold then developed a program for computing the Clar number directly and discovered a significant number of fullerenes in which the Clar sets were not a subset of any Fries set and most of these were not of the type constructed in paper from J. E. Graver and E. J. Hartung in 2016. Exactly why this occurs is somewhat of a mystery. In her Ph.D. thesis, Hartung developed the concept of Clar chains to describe the Kekulé structure giving the Clar sets; in his Ph.D. thesis, Fenton developed the concept of a Fries mesh to describe the Kekulé structure giving the Fries sets. Comparing these two constructions enables us to shed some light on this mystery.
Keywords: fullerene, Clar number, Fries number
Published in RUP: 23.03.2026; Views: 245; Downloads: 16
 Full text (1,78 MB) |
2. Mathematical aspects of fullerenesVesna Andova, František Kardoš, Riste Škrekovski, 2016, original scientific article Abstract: Fullerene graphs are cubic, 3-connected, planar graphs with exactly 12 pentagonal faces, while all other faces are hexagons. Fullerene graphs are mathematical models of fullerene molecules, i.e., molecules comprised only by carbon atoms different than graphites and diamonds. We give a survey on fullerene graphs from our perspective, which could be also considered as an introduction to this topic. Different types of fullerene graphs are considered, their symmetries, and construction methods. We give an overview of some graph invariants that can possibly correlate with the fullerene molecule stability, such as: the bipartite edge frustration, the independence number, the saturation number, the number of perfect matchings, etc.
Keywords: fullerene, cubic graph, planar graph, topological indices
Published in RUP: 03.01.2022; Views: 3085; Downloads: 25
Full text (626,25 KB) |
3. |
4. On cyclic edge-connectivity of fullerenesKlavdija Kutnar, Dragan Marušič, 2008, original scientific article Abstract: A graph is said to be cyclically ▫$k$▫-edge-connected, if at least ▫$k$▫ edges must be removed to disconnect it into two components, each containing a cycle. Such a set of ▫$k$▫ edges is called a cyclic-k-edge cutset and it is called a trivial cyclic-k-edge cutset if at least one of the resulting two components induces a single ▫$k$▫-cycle. It is known that fullerenes, that is, 3-connected cubic planar graphs all of whose faces are pentagons and hexagons, are cyclically 5-edge-connected. In this article it is shown that a fullerene ▫$F$▫ containing a nontrivial cyclic-5-edge cutset admits two antipodal pentacaps, that is, two antipodal pentagonal faces whose neighboring faces are also pentagonal. Moreover, it is shown that ▫$F$▫ has a Hamilton cycle, and as a consequence at least ▫$15 \cdot 2^{n/20-1/2}$▫ perfect matchings, where ▫$n$▫ is the order of ▫$F$▫.
Keywords: graph, fullerene graph, cyclic edge-connectivity, hamilton cycle, perfect matching
Published in RUP: 03.04.2017; Views: 3809; Downloads: 146
 Link to full text |
