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AbstractDeciding if a graph has a square root is a classical problem, which has been studied extensively both from graph-theoretic and algorithmic perspective. As the problem is NP-complete, substantial effort has been dedicated to determining the complexity of deciding if a graph has a square root belonging to some specific graph class H. There are both polynomialtime solvable and NP-complete results in this direction, depending on H.1 belongs to K j . Unfortunately, this characterization does not yield a polynomialtime algorithm for deciding whether G has a square root. This problem is called the Square Root problem. In 1994, Motwani and Sudan [31] proved that Square Root is NP-complete.Motivated by its computational hardness, special cases of Square Root have been studied where the input graph G belongs to a particular graph class. It is known that Square Root is polynomial-time solvable on planar graphs [28], and more generally, on every non-trivial minor-closed graph class [33]. Polynomial-time algorithms also exist if the input graph G belongs to one of the following graph classes: block graphs [26], line graphs [29], trivially perfect graphs [30], threshold graphs [30], graphs of maximum degree 6 [7], graphs of maximum average degree smaller than 46 11 [18] 1 graphs with clique number at most 3 [18], and graphs with bounded clique number and no long induced path [18]. On the negative side, Square Root is NP-complete on chordal graphs [23]. There also exist a number of parameterized complexity results for the problem [8,19].The intractability of Square Root has also been attacked by restricting properties of the square root. In this case, the input graph G is an arbitrary graph, and the question is whether G has a square root that belongs to some graph class H specified in advance. This problem is called H-Square Root, and this is the problem which we focus on in this paper.Significant advances have also been made on the complexity of H-Square Root. Previous results show that H-Square Root is polynomial-time solvable for the following graph classes H: trees [28], proper interval graphs [23], bipartite graphs [22], block graphs [26], strongly chordal split graphs [27], ptolemaic graphs [24], 3-sun-free split graphs [24], cactus graphs [18], cactus block graphs [12] and graphs with girth at least g for any fixed g ≥ 6 [14]. The result for 3-sun-free split graphs was extended to a number of other subclasses of split graphs in [25]. We observe that if H-Square Root is polynomial-time s...