Log-concavity of the independence polynomials of $\mathbf{W}_{p}$ graphs (2409.00827v1)

Abstract: Let $G$ be a $\mathbf{W}{p}$ graph if $n\geq p$ and every $p$ pairwise disjoint independent sets of $G$ are contained within $p$ pairwise disjoint maximum independent sets. In this paper, we establish that every $\mathbf{W}{p}$ graph $G$ is $p$-quasi-regularizable if and only if $n\geq (p+1)\alpha $, where $\alpha $ is the independence number of $G$. This finding ensures that the independence polynomial of a connected $\mathbf{W}{p}$ graph $G$ is log-concave whenever $(p+1)\alpha \leq n\leq 2p\alpha +p+1$. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the independence polynomial of the clique corona $G\circ K{p}$ is invariably log-concave for all $p\geq 1$. As an application, we validate a long-standing conjecture claiming that the independence polynomial of a very well-covered graph is unimodal.