6,589 research outputs found
Circumference and Pathwidth of Highly Connected Graphs
Birmele [J. Graph Theory, 2003] proved that every graph with circumference t
has treewidth at most t-1. Under the additional assumption of 2-connectivity,
such graphs have bounded pathwidth, which is a qualitatively stronger result.
Birmele's theorem was extended by Birmele, Bondy and Reed [Combinatorica, 2007]
who showed that every graph without k disjoint cycles of length at least t has
bounded treewidth (as a function of k and t). Our main result states that,
under the additional assumption of (k + 1)- connectivity, such graphs have
bounded pathwidth. In fact, they have pathwidth O(t^3 + tk^2). Moreover,
examples show that (k + 1)-connectivity is required for bounded pathwidth to
hold. These results suggest the following general question: for which values of
k and graphs H does every k-connected H-minor-free graph have bounded
pathwidth? We discuss this question and provide a few observations.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Cubic graphs with large circumference deficit
The circumference of a graph is the length of a longest cycle. By
exploiting our recent results on resistance of snarks, we construct infinite
classes of cyclically -, - and -edge-connected cubic graphs with
circumference ratio bounded from above by , and
, respectively. In contrast, the dominating cycle conjecture implies
that the circumference ratio of a cyclically -edge-connected cubic graph is
at least .
In addition, we construct snarks with large girth and large circumference
deficit, solving Problem 1 proposed in [J. H\"agglund and K. Markstr\"om, On
stable cycles and cycle double covers of graphs with large circumference, Disc.
Math. 312 (2012), 2540--2544]
Defective and Clustered Graph Colouring
Consider the following two ways to colour the vertices of a graph where the
requirement that adjacent vertices get distinct colours is relaxed. A colouring
has "defect" if each monochromatic component has maximum degree at most
. A colouring has "clustering" if each monochromatic component has at
most vertices. This paper surveys research on these types of colourings,
where the first priority is to minimise the number of colours, with small
defect or small clustering as a secondary goal. List colouring variants are
also considered. The following graph classes are studied: outerplanar graphs,
planar graphs, graphs embeddable in surfaces, graphs with given maximum degree,
graphs with given maximum average degree, graphs excluding a given subgraph,
graphs with linear crossing number, linklessly or knotlessly embeddable graphs,
graphs with given Colin de Verdi\`ere parameter, graphs with given
circumference, graphs excluding a fixed graph as an immersion, graphs with
given thickness, graphs with given stack- or queue-number, graphs excluding
as a minor, graphs excluding as a minor, and graphs excluding
an arbitrary graph as a minor. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: This is a preliminary version of a dynamic survey to be published in
the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric
Cycle lengths in sparse graphs
Let C(G) denote the set of lengths of cycles in a graph G. In the first part
of this paper, we study the minimum possible value of |C(G)| over all graphs G
of average degree d and girth g. Erdos conjectured that |C(G)|
=\Omega(d^{\lfloor (g-1)/2\rfloor}) for all such graphs, and we prove this
conjecture. In particular, the longest cycle in a graph of average degree d and
girth g has length \Omega(d^{\lfloor (g-1)/2\rfloor}). The study of this
problem was initiated by Ore in 1967 and our result improves all previously
known lower bounds on the length of the longest cycle. Moreover, our bound
cannot be improved in general, since known constructions of d-regular Moore
Graphs of girth g have roughly that many vertices. We also show that
\Omega(d^{\lfloor (g-1)/2\rfloor}) is a lower bound for the number of odd cycle
lengths in a graph of chromatic number d and girth g. Further results are
obtained for the number of cycle lengths in H-free graphs of average degree d.
In the second part of the paper, motivated by the conjecture of Erdos and
Gyarfas that every graph of minimum degree at least three contains a cycle of
length a power of two, we prove a general theorem which gives an upper bound on
the average degree of an n-vertex graph with no cycle of even length in a
prescribed infinite sequence of integers. For many sequences, including the
powers of two, our theorem gives the upper bound e^{O(\log^* n)} on the average
degree of graph of order n with no cycle of length in the sequence, where
\log^* n is the number of times the binary logarithm must be applied to n to
get a number which is at mos
Covering cubic graphs with matchings of large size
Let m be a positive integer and let G be a cubic graph of order 2n. We
consider the problem of covering the edge-set of G with the minimum number of
matchings of size m. This number is called excessive [m]-index of G in
literature. The case m=n, that is a covering with perfect matchings, is known
to be strictly related to an outstanding conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson. In
this paper we study in some details the case m=n-1. We show how this parameter
can be large for cubic graphs with low connectivity and we furnish some
evidence that each cyclically 4-connected cubic graph of order 2n has excessive
[n-1]-index at most 4. Finally, we discuss the relation between excessive
[n-1]-index and some other graph parameters as oddness and circumference.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
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