Cycles through five edges in 3-connected cubic graphs (Q581414)

Given five edges in a 3-connected cubic graph there are obvious reasons why there may not be one cycle passing through all of them. For instance, an odd subset of the edges may form a cutset of the graph. By restricting the sets of five edges in a natural way the authors give necessary and sufficient conditions for the set to be a subset of edges of some cycle. It follows as a corollary that, under suitable conditions, any five edges of a cyclically 5-edge connected cubic graph lie on a cycle. This result verifies two conjectures of Lovasz in the case \(k=5.\) Conjecture 1. Any k independent edges in a cyclically \((k+1)\)-edge connected cubic graph lie on a common cycle. Conjecture 2. Except for a finite number of cyclically k-edge connected cubic graphs, any k independent edges forming a free path system lie on a common cycle.