Extremal polygonal chains with respect to the Kirchhoff index.

The Kirchhoff index is defined as the sum of resistance distances between all pairs of vertices in a graph. This index is a critical parameter for measuring graph structures. In this paper, we characterize polygonal chains with the minimum Kirchhoff index, and characterize even (odd) polygonal chains with the maximum Kirchhoff index, which extends the results of Liu and You (2022), Sun and Yang (2023) and Yang and Klein (2014); Yang and Sun (2022); Yang and Wang (2019) to a more general case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]