Counterexamples to conjectures by Gross, Mansour and Tucker on partial-dual genus polynomials of ribbon graphs

Abstract: Gross, Mansour and Tucker introduced the partial-dual orientable genus polynomial and the partial-dual Euler genus polynomial. They computed these two partial-dual genus polynomials of four families of ribbon graphs, posed some research problems and made some conjectures. In this paper, we introduce the notion of signed sequences of bouquets and obtain the partial-dual Euler genus polynomials for all ribbon graphs with the number of edges less than 4 and the partial-dual orientable genus polynomials for all orientable ribbon graphs with the number of edges less than 5 in terms of signed sequences. We check all the conjectures and find a counterexample to the Conjecture 3.1 in their paper: There is no orientable ribbon graph having a non-constant partial-dual genus polynomial with only one non-zero coefficient. Motivated by this counterexample, we further find an infinite family of counterexamples to the conjecture. Moreover, we find a counterexample to the Conjecture 5.3 in their paper: The partial-dual Euler-genus polynomial for any non-orientable ribbon graph is interpolating.