The cubical matching complex revisited

Abstract

Ehrenborg noted that all tilings of a bipartite planar graph are encoded by its cubical matching complex and claimed that this complex is collapsible. We point out to an oversight in his proof and explain why these complexes can be the disjoint union of two or more collapsible complexes. We also prove that all links in these complexes are suspensions up to homotopy. Furthermore, we extend the definition of a cubical matching complex to planar graphs that are not necessarily bipartite, and show that these complexes are either contractible or a disjoint union of contractible complexes. For a simple connected region that can be tiled with dominoes (2 × 1 and 1 × 2) and 2 × 2 squares, let f_i denote the number of tilings with exactly i squares. We prove that f₀ − f₁ + f₂ − f₃ + ⋯ = 1 (established by Ehrenborg) is the only linear relation for the numbers f_i.