Face-Width of Pfaffian Braces and Polyhex Graphs on Surfaces

Abstract

A graph $G$ with a perfect matching is Pfaffian if it admits an orientation $D$ such that every central cycle $C$ (i.e. $C$ is of even size and $G-V(C)$ has a perfect matching) has an odd number of edges oriented in either direction of the cycle. It is known that the number of perfect matchings of a Pfaffian graph can be computed in polynomial time. In this paper, we show that every embedding of a Pfaffian brace (i.e. 2-extendable bipartite graph)  on a surface with a positive genus has face-width at most 3.  Further, we study Pfaffian cubic braces and obtain a characterization of Pfaffian polyhex graphs: a polyhex graph is Pfaffian if and only if it is either non-bipartite or isomorphic to the cube, or the Heawood graph, or the Cartesian product $C_k\times K_2$ for even integers $k\ge 6$.