Hom complexes and homotopy in the category of graphs

We investigate a notion of ×-homotopy of graph maps that is based on the internal hom associated to the categorical product in the category of graphs. It is shown that graph ×homotopy is characterized by the topological properties of the Hom complex, a functorial way to assign a poset (and hence topological space) to a pair of graphs; Hom complexes were introduced by Lovász and further studied by Babson and Kozlov to give topological bounds on chromatic number. Along the way, we also establish some structural properties of Hom complexes involving products and exponentials of graphs, as well as a symmetry result which can be used to reprove a theorem of Kozlov involving foldings of graphs. Graph ×homotopy naturally leads to a notion of homotopy equivalence which we show has several equivalent characterizations. We apply the notions of ×-homotopy equivalence to the class of dismantlable graphs to get a list of conditions that again characterize these. We end with a discussion of graph homotopies arising from other internal homs, including the construction of ‘A-theory’ associated to the cartesian product in the category of reflexive graphs.