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

On sufficient conditions for Hamiltonicity in dense graphs

We study structural conditions in dense graphs that guarantee the existence of vertex-spanning substructures such as Hamilton cycles. It is easy to see that every Hamiltonian graph is connected, has a perfect fractional matching and, excluding the bipartite case, contains an odd cycle. Our main result in turn states that any large enough graph that robustly satisfies these properties must already be Hamiltonian. Moreover, the same holds for embedding powers of cycles and graphs of sublinear bandwidth subject to natural generalisations of connectivity, matchings and odd cycles. This solves the embedding problem that underlies multiple lines of research on sufficient conditions for Hamiltonicity in dense graphs. As applications, we recover and establish Bandwidth Theorems in a variety of settings including Ore-type degree conditions, P\'osa-type degree conditions, deficiency-type conditions, locally dense and inseparable graphs, multipartite graphs as well as robust expanders

Completion and deficiency problems

Given a partial Steiner triple system (STS) of order $n$, what is the order of the smallest complete STS it can be embedded into? The study of this question goes back more than 40 years. In this paper we answer it for relatively sparse STSs, showing that given a partial STS of order $n$ with at most $r \le \varepsilon n^2$ triples, it can always be embedded into a complete STS of order $n+O(\sqrt{r})$, which is asymptotically optimal. We also obtain similar results for completions of Latin squares and other designs. This suggests a new, natural class of questions, called deficiency problems. Given a global spanning property $\mathcal{P}$ and a graph $G$, we define the deficiency of the graph $G$ with respect to the property $\mathcal{P}$ to be the smallest positive integer $t$ such that the join $G\ast K_t$ has property $\mathcal{P}$. To illustrate this concept we consider deficiency versions of some well-studied properties, such as having a $K_k$-decomposition, Hamiltonicity, having a triangle-factor and having a perfect matching in hypergraphs. The main goal of this paper is to propose a systematic study of these problems; thus several future research directions are also given

On realization graphs of degree sequences

Given the degree sequence $d$ of a graph, the realization graph of $d$ is the graph having as its vertices the labeled realizations of $d$, with two vertices adjacent if one realization may be obtained from the other via an edge-switching operation. We describe a connection between Cartesian products in realization graphs and the canonical decomposition of degree sequences described by R.I. Tyshkevich and others. As applications, we characterize the degree sequences whose realization graphs are triangle-free graphs or hypercubes.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure