STRONG MATCHING PRECLUSION FOR THE ALTERNATING GROUP GRAPHS AND SPLIT-STARS.

The strong matching preclusion number of a graph is the minimum number of vertices and edges whose deletion results in a graph that has neither perfect matchings nor almost-perfect matchings. This is an extension of the matching preclusion problem and has recently been introduced by Park and Ihm.15 In this paper, we examine properties of strong matching preclusion for alternating group graphs, by finding their strong matching preclusion numbers and categorizing all optimal solutions. More importantly, we prove a general result on taking a Cartesian product of a graph with K2 (an edge) to obtain the corresponding results for split-stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]