Magnitude homology of graphs and discrete Morse theory on Asao–Izumihara complexes

Recently, Asao and Izumihara introduced CW-complexes whose homology groups are isomorphic to direct summands of the graph magnitude homology group. In this paper, we study the homotopy type of the CW-complexes in connection with the diagonality of magnitude homology groups. We prove that the Asao-Izumihara complex is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres for pawful graphs introduced by Y. Gu. The result can be considered as a homotopy type version of Gu's result. We also formulate a slight generalization of the notion of pawful graphs and find new non-pawful diagonal graphs of diameter $2$.