In 1987, Alavi, Malde, Schwenk and Erdős conjectured that the independence polynomial of any tree is unimodal. Although it attracts many researchers' attention, it is still open. Motivated by this conjecture, in this paper, we prove that rooted products of some graphs preserve real rootedness of independence polynomials. As application, we not only give a unified proof for some known results, but also we can apply them to generate infinite kinds of trees whose independence polynomials have only real zeros. Thus their independence polynomials are unimodal.

Is there some absolute $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}>0$ such that for any claw-free graph $G$, the chromatic number of the square of $G$ satisfies $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})\leqslant (2-\unicode[STIX]{x1D700})\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}(G)^{2}$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}(G)$ is the clique number of $G$? Erdős and Nešetřil asked this question for the specific case where $G$ is the line graph of a simple graph, and this was answered in the affirmative by Molloy and Reed. We show that the answer to the more general question is also yes, and, moreover, that it essentially reduces to the original question of Erdős and Nešetřil.


Matthews and Sumner have proved in [10] that if G is a 2-connectedclaw-free graph of order n such that δ(G) ≥ (n-2)/3, then G isHamiltonian. We say that a graph is almost claw-free if for every vertexv of G, 〈N(v)〉 is 2-dominated and the set A of centers of claws of G isan independent set. Broersma et al. [5] have proved that if G isa 2-connected almost claw-free graph of order n such that n such that δ(G) ≥ (n-2)/3, then G is Hamiltonian. We generalize these resultsby considering the graphs satisfying the following property: for everyvertex v ∈ A, there exist exactly two vertices x and y of V\A such that N(v) ⊆ N[x] ∪ N[y]. We extend some other knownresults on claw-free graphs to this new class of graphs.