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On structural properties of trees with minimal atom-bond connectivity index II (1501.05752v1)
Published 23 Jan 2015 in cs.DM and math.CO
Abstract: The {\em atom-bond connectivity (ABC) index} is a degree-based graph topological index that found chemical applications. The problem of complete characterization of trees with minimal $ABC$ index is still an open problem. In~\cite{d-sptmabci-2014}, it was shown that trees with minimal ABC index do not contain so-called {\em $B_k$-branches}, with $k \geq 5$, and that they do not have more than four $B_4$-branches. Our main results here reveal that the number of $B_1$ and $B_2$-branches are also bounded from above by small fixed constants. Namely, we show that trees with minimal ABC index do not contain more than four $B_1$-branches and more than eleven $B_2$-branches.