1,783 research outputs found
Cyclically five-connected cubic graphs
A cubic graph is cyclically 5-connected if is simple, 3-connected,
has at least 10 vertices and for every set of edges of size at most four,
at most one component of contains circuits. We prove that if
and are cyclically 5-connected cubic graphs and topologically
contains , then either and are isomorphic, or (modulo well-described
exceptions) there exists a cyclically 5-connected cubic graph such that
topologically contains and is obtained from in one of the
following two ways. Either is obtained from by subdividing two
distinct edges of and joining the two new vertices by an edge, or is
obtained from by subdividing each edge of a circuit of length five and
joining the new vertices by a matching to a new circuit of length five disjoint
from in such a way that the cyclic orders of the two circuits agree. We
prove a companion result, where by slightly increasing the connectivity of
we are able to eliminate the second construction. We also prove versions of
both of these results when is almost cyclically 5-connected in the sense
that it satisfies the definition except for 4-edge cuts such that one side is a
circuit of length four. In this case is required to be almost cyclically
5-connected and to have fewer circuits of length four than . In particular,
if has at most one circuit of length four, then is required to be
cyclically 5-connected. However, in this more general setting the operations
describing the possible graphs are more complicated.Comment: 47 pages, 5 figures. Revised according to referee's comments. To
appear in J. Combin. Theory Ser.
On cubic bridgeless graphs whose edge-set cannot be covered by four perfect matchings
The problem of establishing the number of perfect matchings necessary to
cover the edge-set of a cubic bridgeless graph is strictly related to a famous
conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson. In this paper we prove that deciding whether
this number is at most 4 for a given cubic bridgeless graph is NP-complete. We
also construct an infinite family of snarks (cyclically
4-edge-connected cubic graphs of girth at least five and chromatic index four)
whose edge-set cannot be covered by 4 perfect matchings. Only two such graphs
were known. It turns out that the family also has interesting
properties with respect to the shortest cycle cover problem. The shortest cycle
cover of any cubic bridgeless graph with edges has length at least
, and we show that this inequality is strict for graphs of .
We also construct the first known snark with no cycle cover of length less than
.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
A superlinear bound on the number of perfect matchings in cubic bridgeless graphs
Lovasz and Plummer conjectured in the 1970's that cubic bridgeless graphs
have exponentially many perfect matchings. This conjecture has been verified
for bipartite graphs by Voorhoeve in 1979, and for planar graphs by Chudnovsky
and Seymour in 2008, but in general only linear bounds are known. In this
paper, we provide the first superlinear bound in the general case.Comment: 54 pages v2: a short (missing) proof of Lemma 10 was adde
Excluded minors in cubic graphs
Let G be a cubic graph, with girth at least five, such that for every
partition X,Y of its vertex set with |X|,|Y|>6 there are at least six edges
between X and Y. We prove that if there is no homeomorphic embedding of the
Petersen graph in G, and G is not one particular 20-vertex graph, then either
G\v is planar for some vertex v, or G can be drawn with crossings in the plane,
but with only two crossings, both on the infinite region. We also prove several
other theorems of the same kind.Comment: 62 pages, 17 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]
Petersen cores and the oddness of cubic graphs
Let be a bridgeless cubic graph. Consider a list of 1-factors of .
Let be the set of edges contained in precisely members of the
1-factors. Let be the smallest over all lists of
1-factors of . If is not 3-edge-colorable, then . In
[E. Steffen, 1-factor and cycle covers of cubic graphs, J. Graph Theory 78(3)
(2015) 195-206] it is shown that if , then is
an upper bound for the girth of . We show that bounds the oddness
of as well. We prove that .
If , then every -core has a very
specific structure. We call these cores Petersen cores. We show that for any
given oddness there is a cyclically 4-edge-connected cubic graph with
. On the other hand, the difference between
and can be arbitrarily big. This is true even
if we additionally fix the oddness. Furthermore, for every integer ,
there exists a bridgeless cubic graph such that .Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure
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
Generation and Properties of Snarks
For many of the unsolved problems concerning cycles and matchings in graphs
it is known that it is sufficient to prove them for \emph{snarks}, the class of
nontrivial 3-regular graphs which cannot be 3-edge coloured. In the first part
of this paper we present a new algorithm for generating all non-isomorphic
snarks of a given order. Our implementation of the new algorithm is 14 times
faster than previous programs for generating snarks, and 29 times faster for
generating weak snarks. Using this program we have generated all non-isomorphic
snarks on vertices. Previously lists up to vertices have been
published. In the second part of the paper we analyze the sets of generated
snarks with respect to a number of properties and conjectures. We find that
some of the strongest versions of the cycle double cover conjecture hold for
all snarks of these orders, as does Jaeger's Petersen colouring conjecture,
which in turn implies that Fulkerson's conjecture has no small counterexamples.
In contrast to these positive results we also find counterexamples to eight
previously published conjectures concerning cycle coverings and the general
cycle structure of cubic graphs.Comment: Submitted for publication V2: various corrections V3: Figures updated
and typos corrected. This version differs from the published one in that the
Arxiv-version has data about the automorphisms of snarks; Journal of
Combinatorial Theory. Series B. 201
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