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

Embedding large subgraphs into dense graphs

What conditions ensure that a graph G contains some given spanning subgraph H? The most famous examples of results of this kind are probably Dirac's theorem on Hamilton cycles and Tutte's theorem on perfect matchings. Perfect matchings are generalized by perfect F-packings, where instead of covering all the vertices of G by disjoint edges, we want to cover G by disjoint copies of a (small) graph F. It is unlikely that there is a characterization of all graphs G which contain a perfect F-packing, so as in the case of Dirac's theorem it makes sense to study conditions on the minimum degree of G which guarantee a perfect F-packing. The Regularity lemma of Szemeredi and the Blow-up lemma of Komlos, Sarkozy and Szemeredi have proved to be powerful tools in attacking such problems and quite recently, several long-standing problems and conjectures in the area have been solved using these. In this survey, we give an outline of recent progress (with our main emphasis on F-packings, Hamiltonicity problems and tree embeddings) and describe some of the methods involved