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