On bicriticality of (3,6)-fullerene graphs

Abstract

A (3,6)-fullerene is a plane cubic graph whose faces are only triangles and hexagons. A connected graph G with at least $$2n+2$$ vertices is said to be n-extendable if it has n independent edges and every set of n independent edges extends to a perfect matching of G. A graph G is said to be bicritical if for every pair of distinct vertices u and v, $$G-u-v$$ has a perfect matching. It is known that every (3,6)-fullerene is 1-extendable, but not 2-extendable. In this short paper, we show that a (3,6)-fullerene G is bicritical if and only if G has the connectivity 3 and is not isomorphic to one graph (2,4,2). As a surprising consequence we have that a (3,6)-fullerene is bicritical if and only if each hexagonal face is resonant.