A prism graph is a graph corresponding to the skeleton of an -prism. Prism graphs are therefore both planar and polyhedral. An -prism graph has nodes and edges. The -prism graph is isomorphic to the generalized Petersen graph as well as to the graph Cartesian product , where is the path graph on two nodes and is the cycle graph on nodes.
There appears to be no standard notation for the prism graph. It os variously denoted (this work), (Gallian 1987), (Hladnik et al. 2002), or (Gross and Yellen 1999, p. 14, standing for "circular ladder").
For odd , the -prism is isomorphic to the circulant graph , as can be seen by rotating the inner cycle by and increasing its radius to equal that of the outer cycle in the top embeddings above. In addition, for odd , is isomorphic to , , ..., .
The prism graph is equivalent to the Cayley graph of the dihedral group with respect to the generating set (Biggs 1993, p. 126).
The prism graph is the line graph of the complete bipartite graph . The prism graph is isomorphic to the cubical graph. The -prism graph is isomorphic to the Haar graph .
As a result of being the graph Cartesian product of unit-distance graphs, a prism graphs is itself a unit-distance graph (Horvat and Pisanski 2010).
Prism graphs are graceful (Gallian 1987, Frucht and Gallian 1988, Gallian 2018).
The numbers of directed Hamiltonian paths on the -prism graph for , 4, ... are 60, 144, 260, 456, 700, 1056, 1476, ... (OEIS A124350), which has the beautiful closed form
where is the floor function (M. Alekseyev, pers. comm., Feb. 7, 2008).
The numbers of graph cycles on the -prism graph for , 4, ... are 14, 28, 52, 94, 170, ... (OEIS A077265), illustrated above for .
The graph Cartesian product is ismorphic to the torus grid graph .
The bipartite double graph of prism graph for odd is the prism graph .
Precomputed properties of prism graphs are available in the Wolfram Language as GraphData["Prism", n].
The generalization of the prism graph to the graph Cartesian product may be known as a stacked prism graph.