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Zigzag Structures of Simple Two-Faced Polyhedra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2005

MICHEL DEZA
Affiliation:
LIGA, ENS/CNRS, Paris and Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo (e-mail: Michel.Deza@ens.fr)
MATHIEU DUTOUR
Affiliation:
LIGA, ENS/CNRS, Paris and The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (e-mail: Mathieu.Dutour@ens.fr)
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Abstract

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A zigzag in a plane graph is a circuit of edges, such that any two, but not three, consecutive edges belong to the same face. A railroad in a plane graph is a circuit of hexagonal faces, such that any hexagon is adjacent to its neighbours on opposite edges. A graph without a railroad is called tight. We consider the zigzag and railroad structures of general 3-valent plane graph and, especially, of simple two-faced polyhedra, i.e., 3-valent 3-polytopes with only $a$-gonal and $b$-gonal faces, where $3 \leq a < b \leq 6$; the main cases are $(a,b)=(3,6), (4,6)$ and $(5,6)$ (the fullerenes).

We completely describe the zigzag structure for the case $(a,b)\,{=}\,(3,6)$. For the case $(a,b)\,{=}\,(4,6)$ we describe symmetry groups, classify all tight graphs with simple zigzags and give the upper bound 9 for the number of zigzags in general tight graphs. For the remaining case $(a,b)\,{=}\,(5,6)$ we give a construction realizing a prescribed zigzag structure.

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Paper
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press