On the Computational Complexity of Degenerate Unit Distance Representations of Graphs

Some graphs admit drawings in the Euclidean k-space in such a (natural) way, that edges are represented as line segments of unit length. Such drawings will be called k dimensional unit distance representations. When two non-adjacent vertices are drawn in the same point, we say that the representation is degenerate. The dimension (the Euclidean dimension) of a graph is defined to be the minimum integer k needed that a given graph has non-degenerate k dimensional unit distance representation (with the property that non-adjacent vertices are mapped to points, that are not distance one appart). It is proved that deciding if an input graph is homomorphic to a graph with dimension k ≥ 2 (with the Euclidean dimension k ≥ 2) are NP-hard problems.