05Cxx Graph theory (For applications of graphs, see 68R10, 81Q30, 81T15, 82B20, 82C20, 90C35, 92E10, 94C15)
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An edge of a perfect graph $G$ is critical if $G-e$ is imperfect. We would like to decide whether $G - e$ is still {\sl almost perfect} or already {\sl very imperfect}. Via relaxations of the stable set polytope of a graph, we define two superclasses of perfect graphs: rank-perfect and weakly rank-perfect graphs. Membership in those two classes indicates how far an imperfect graph is away from being perfect. We study the cases, when a critical edge is removed from the line graph of a bipartite graph or from the complement of such a graph.
We call an edge $e$ of a perfect graph $G$ critical if $G-e$ is imperfect and say further that $e$ is anticritical with respect to the complementary graph $\overline G$. We ask in which perfect graphs critical and anticritical edges occur and how to find critical and anticritical edges in perfect graphs. Finally, we study whether we can order the edges of certain perfect graphs such that deleting all the edges yields a sequence of perfect graphs ending up with a stable set.
We focus on two new types of extremal graphs with respect to perfectness: critically and anticritically perfect graphs that lose their perfectness by simply deleting and adding an arbitrary edge, respectively. We present examples and study properties in order to compare critically and anticritically perfect graphs with minimally imperfect graphs, another type of extremal graphs with respect to perfectness. We discuss two attempts to characterize the classes of all critically and anticritically perfect graphs and give a brief overview on classes of perfect graphs which contain critically or anticritically perfect graphs.