Ore-degree threshold for the square of a Hamiltonian cycle

A classic theorem of Dirac from 1952 states that every graph with minimum degree at least n/2 contains a Hamiltonian cycle. In 1963, P\'osa conjectured that every graph with minimum degree at least 2n/3 contains the square of a Hamiltonian cycle. In 1960, Ore relaxed the degree condition in the Dirac's theorem by proving that every graph with $deg(u) + deg(v) \geq n$ for every $uv \notin E(G)$ contains a Hamiltonian cycle. Recently, Ch\^au proved an Ore-type version of P\'osa's conjecture for graphs on $n\geq n_0$ vertices using the regularity--blow-up method; consequently the $n_0$ is very large (involving a tower function). Here we present another proof that avoids the use of the regularity lemma. Aside from the fact that our proof holds for much smaller $n_0$, we believe that our method of proof will be of independent interest.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure. In addition to some fixed typos, this updated version contains a simplified "connecting lemma" in Section 3.

A hamiltonian cycle in the square of a 2-connected graph in linear time

Fleischner’s theorem says that the square of every 2-connected graph contains a Hamiltonian cycle. We present a proof resulting in an O(|E|) algorithm for producing a Hamiltonian cycle in the square G2 of a 2-connected graph G = (V, E). The previous best was O(|V|2) by Lau in 1980. More generally, we get an O(|E|) algorithm for producing a Hamiltonian path between any two prescribed vertices, and we get an O(|V|2) algorithm for producing cycles C3, C4 , . . . , C | V | in G2 of lengths 3,4 , . . . , |V|, respectively

Local resilience for squares of almost spanning cycles in sparse random graphs

In 1962, P\'osa conjectured that a graph $G=(V, E)$ contains a square of a Hamiltonian cycle if $\delta(G)\ge 2n/3$. Only more than thirty years later Koml\'os, S\'ark\H{o}zy, and Szemer\'edi proved this conjecture using the so-called Blow-Up Lemma. Here we extend their result to a random graph setting. We show that for every $\epsilon > 0$ and $p=n^{-1/2+\epsilon}$ a.a.s. every subgraph of $G_{n,p}$ with minimum degree at least $(2/3+\epsilon)np$ contains the square of a cycle on $(1-o(1))n$ vertices. This is almost best possible in three ways: (1) for $p\ll n^{-1/2}$ the random graph will not contain any square of a long cycle (2) one cannot hope for a resilience version for the square of a spanning cycle (as deleting all edges in the neighborhood of single vertex destroys this property) and (3) for $c<2/3$ a.a.s. $G_{n,p}$ contains a subgraph with minimum degree at least $cnp$ which does not contain the square of a path on $(1/3+c)n$ vertices

Field theoretic approach to the counting problem of Hamiltonian cycles of graphs

A Hamiltonian cycle of a graph is a closed path that visits each site once and only once. I study a field theoretic representation for the number of Hamiltonian cycles for arbitrary graphs. By integrating out quadratic fluctuations around the saddle point, one obtains an estimate for the number which reflects characteristics of graphs well. The accuracy of the estimate is verified by applying it to 2d square lattices with various boundary conditions. This is the first example of extracting meaningful information from the quadratic approximation to the field theory representation.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, uses epsf.sty. Estimates for the site entropy and the gamma exponent indicated explicitl

Row-Hamiltonian Latin squares and Falconer varieties

A \emph{Latin square} is a matrix of symbols such that each symbol occurs exactly once in each row and column. A Latin square $L$ is \emph{row-Hamiltonian} if the permutation induced by each pair of distinct rows of $L$ is a full cycle permutation. Row-Hamiltonian Latin squares are equivalent to perfect $1$-factorisations of complete bipartite graphs. For the first time, we exhibit a family of Latin squares that are row-Hamiltonian and also achieve precisely one of the related properties of being column-Hamiltonian or symbol-Hamiltonian. This family allows us to construct non-trivial, anti-associative, isotopically $L$-closed loop varieties, solving an open problem posed by Falconer in 1970

On 3-regular 4-ordered graphs

AbstractA simple graph G is k-ordered (respectively, k-ordered hamiltonian), if for any sequence of k distinct vertices v1,…,vkof G there exists a cycle (respectively, hamiltonian cycle) in G containing these k vertices in the specified order. In 1997 Ng and Schultz introduced these concepts of cycle orderability and posed the question of the existence of 3-regular 4-ordered (hamiltonian) graphs other than K4 and K3,3. Ng and Schultz observed that a 3-regular 4-ordered graph on more than 4 vertices is triangle free. We prove that a 3-regular 4-ordered graph G on more than 6 vertices is square free,and we show that the smallest graph that is triangle and square free, namely the Petersen graph, is 4-ordered. Furthermore, we prove that the smallest graph after K4 and K3,3 that is 3-regular 4-ordered hamiltonianis the Heawood graph. Finally, we construct an infinite family of 3-regular 4-ordered graphs