Planar ternary graphs, flag spheres, and Delannoy polynomials

In 2022 Kim showed that when a graph $G$ is ternary (without induced cycles of length divisible by three), its independence complex $\text{Ind}(G)$ is either contractible or homotopy equivalent to a sphere. In this paper, we show that when $\text{Ind}(G)$ is homotopy equivalent to a sphere of dimens