Hamiltonicity, Pancyclicity, and Cycle Extendability in Graphs

The study of cycles, particularly Hamiltonian cycles, is very important in many applications. Bondy posited his famous metaconjecture, that every condition sufficient for Hamiltonicity actually guarantees a graph is pancyclic. Pancyclicity is a stronger structural property than Hamiltonicity. An even stronger structural property is for a graph to be cycle extendable. Hendry conjectured that any graph which is Hamiltonian and chordal is cycle extendable. In this dissertation, cycle extendability is investigated and generalized. It is proved that chordal 2-connected K1,3-free graphs are cycle extendable. S-cycle extendability was defined by Beasley and Brown, where S is any set of positive integers. A conjecture is presented that Hamiltonian chordal graphs are {1, 2}-cycle extendable. Dirac’s Theorem is an classic result establishing a minimum degree condition for a graph to be Hamiltonian. Ore’s condition is another early result giving a sufficient condition for Hamiltonicity. In this dissertation, generalizations of Dirac’s and Ore’s Theorems are presented. The Chvatal-Erdos condition is a result showing that if the maximum size of an independent set in a graph G is less than or equal to the minimum number of vertices whose deletion increases the number of components of G, then G is Hamiltonian. It is proved here that the Chvatal-Erdos condition guarantees that a graph is cycle extendable. It is also shown that a graph having a Hamiltonian elimination ordering is cycle extendable. The existence of Hamiltonian cycles which avoid sets of edges of a certain size and certain subgraphs is a new topic recently investigated by Harlan, et al., which clearly has applications to scheduling and communication networks among other things. The theory is extended here to bipartite graphs. Specifically, the conditions for the existence of a Hamiltonian cycle that avoids edges, or some subgraph of a certain size, are determined for the bipartite case. Briefly, this dissertation contributes to the state of the art of Hamiltonian cycles, cycle extendability and edge and graph avoiding Hamiltonian cycles, which is an important area of graph theory

Hamilton cycles in highly connected and expanding graphs

In this paper we prove a sufficient condition for the existence of a Hamilton cycle, which is applicable to a wide variety of graphs, including relatively sparse graphs. In contrast to previous criteria, ours is based on only two properties: one requiring expansion of ``small'' sets, the other ensuring the existence of an edge between any two disjoint ``large'' sets. We also discuss applications in positional games, random graphs and extremal graph theory.Comment: 19 page

Heavy subgraphs, stability and hamiltonicity

Let $G$ be a graph. Adopting the terminology of Broersma et al. and \v{C}ada, respectively, we say that $G$ is 2-heavy if every induced claw ($K_{1,3}$) of $G$ contains two end-vertices each one has degree at least $|V(G)|/2$; and $G$ is o-heavy if every induced claw of $G$ contains two end-vertices with degree sum at least $|V(G)|$ in $G$. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, and say that $G$ is \emph{$S$-c-heavy} if for a given graph $S$ and every induced subgraph $G'$ of $G$ isomorphic to $S$ and every maximal clique $C$ of $G'$, every non-trivial component of $G'-C$ contains a vertex of degree at least $|V(G)|/2$ in $G$. In terms of this concept, our original motivation that a theorem of Hu in 1999 can be stated as every 2-connected 2-heavy and $N$-c-heavy graph is hamiltonian, where $N$ is the graph obtained from a triangle by adding three disjoint pendant edges. In this paper, we will characterize all connected graphs $S$ such that every 2-connected o-heavy and $S$-c-heavy graph is hamiltonian. Our work results in a different proof of a stronger version of Hu's theorem. Furthermore, our main result improves or extends several previous results.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, finial version for publication in Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theor

Some local--global phenomena in locally finite graphs

In this paper we present some results for a connected infinite graph $G$ with finite degrees where the properties of balls of small radii guarantee the existence of some Hamiltonian and connectivity properties of $G$. (For a vertex $w$ of a graph $G$ the ball of radius $r$ centered at $w$ is the subgraph of $G$ induced by the set $M_r(w)$ of vertices whose distance from $w$ does not exceed $r$). In particular, we prove that if every ball of radius 2 in $G$ is 2-connected and $G$ satisfies the condition $d_G(u)+d_G(v)\geq |M_2(w)|-1$ for each path $uwv$ in $G$, where $u$ and $v$ are non-adjacent vertices, then $G$ has a Hamiltonian curve, introduced by K\"undgen, Li and Thomassen (2017). Furthermore, we prove that if every ball of radius 1 in $G$ satisfies Ore's condition (1960) then all balls of any radius in $G$ are Hamiltonian.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; journal accepted versio

The Laplacian Eigenvalues and Invariants of Graphs

In this paper, we investigate some relations between the invariants (including vertex and edge connectivity and forwarding indices) of a graph and its Laplacian eigenvalues. In addition, we present a sufficient condition for the existence of Hamiltonicity in a graph involving its Laplacian eigenvalues.Comment: 10 pages,Filomat, 201