Paloma T. Lima, Graph Square Roots of Small Distance from Degree One Graphs

Given a graph class $\mathcal{H}$, the task of the $\mathcal{H}$-Square Root problem is to decide whether an input graph G has a square root H that belongs to $\mathcal{H}$. We are interested in the parameterized complexity of the problem for classes $\mathcal{H}$ that are composed by the graphs at vertex deletion distance at most $k$ from graphs of maximum degree at most one. That is, we are looking for a square root H that has a modulator S of size k such that H-S is the disjoint union of isolated vertices and disjoint edges. We show that different variants of the problems with constraints on the number of isolated vertices and edges in H-S are FPT when parameterized by k, by providing algorithms with running time $2^{2^{O(k)}}\cdot n^{O(1)}$. We further show that the running time of our algorithms is asymptotically optimal and it is unlikely that the double-exponential dependence on k could be avoided. In particular, we prove that the VC-k Root problem, that asks whether an input graph has a square root with vertex cover of size at most k, cannot be solved in time $2^{2^{o(k)}}\cdot n^{O(1)}$ unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis fails. Moreover, we point out that VC-k Root parameterized by k does not admit a subexponential kernel unless P=NP.

This is a joint work with Petr Golovach and Charis Papadopoulos.