Towards a characterisation of Pfaffian graphs

Charles H. C. Little, Franz Rendl, Ilse Fischer

Published 1999-09-03, updated 1999-09-06Version 2

A bipartite graph G is known to be Pfaffian if and only if it does not contain an even subdivision H of $K_{3,3}$ such that $G - VH$ contains a 1-factor. However a general characterisation of Pfaffian graphs in terms of forbidden subgraphs is currently not known. In this paper we describe a possible approach to the derivation of such a characterisation. We also extend the characterisation for bipartite graphs to a slightly more general class of graphs.