Star and Semi-Star Transformations in Fullerene Graphs

A perfect star packing in a graph G is a spanning subgraph of G whose every component is isomorphic to the star graph $K_{1,3}$. A perfect star packing of a fullerene graph G is of type P0 if all the centers of stars lie on hexagons of G. Many fullerene graphs arise from smaller fullerene graphs by applying some transformations. In this paper, we introduce two transformations for fullerene graphs that have perfect star packing of type P0 and examine some characteristics of the graphs obtained from this transformation.