Contractions, Removals and How to Certify 3-Connectivity in Linear Time

It is well-known as an existence result that every 3-connected graph G=(V,E) on more than 4 vertices admits a sequence of contractions and a sequence of removal operations to K_4 such that every intermediate graph is 3-connected. We show that both sequences can be computed in optimal time, improving the previously best known running times of O(|V|^2) to O(|V|+|E|). This settles also the open question of finding a linear time 3-connectivity test that is certifying and extends to a certifying 3-edge-connectivity test in the same time. The certificates used are easy to verify in time O(|E|).Comment: preliminary versio

A generating function for the cubic interactions of higher spin fields

We present an off-shell generating function for all cubic interactions of Higher Spin gauge fields constructed in arXiv:1003.2877. It is a generalization of the on-shell generating function proposed in arXiv:1006.5242, is written in a very compact way, and turns out to have a remarkable structure.Comment: 14 pages, Latex,v.2 misprints corrected, v.3 ref. added, v. 4 published in Phys. Lett.

Path-factors involving paths of order seven and nine

In this paper, we show the following two theorems (here $c_{i}(G-X)$ is the number of components $C$ of $G-X$ with $|V(C)|=i$): (i)~If a graph $G$ satisfies $c_{1}(G-X)+\frac{1}{3}c_{3}(G-X)+\frac{1}{3}c_{5}(G-X)\leq \frac{2}{3}|X|$ for all $X\subseteq V(G)$, then $G$ has a $\{P_{2},P_{7}\}$-factor. (ii)~If a graph $G$ satisfies $c_{1}(G-X)+c_{3}(G-X)+\frac{2}{3}c_{5}(G-X)+\frac{1}{3}c_{7}(G-X)\leq \frac{2}{3}|X|$ for all $X\subseteq V(G)$, then $G$ has a $\{P_{2},P_{9}\}$-factor.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure