Stable dominating circuits in snarks (Q5936035)

A snark is a cyclically 4-edge-connected, 3-valent graph with girth at least 5 that admits no 3-edge-coloring. A circuit \(C\) is said to be stable if no other circuit \(C'\) satisfies \(V(C)\subseteq V(C')\). \textit{H. Fleischner} proved in [J. Graph Theory 18, No. 5, 449-459 (1994; Zbl 0807.05050)] the equivalence of G. Sabidussi's ``compatibility conjecture'' with the conjecture that in a 3-valent graph \(G\), given any dominating circuit \(C\) (i.e., every edge of \(G\) is incident with some vertex of \(C\)), there exists a cycle double cover of \(G\) that includes \(C\). In the present paper it is shown that any smallest counterexample \(G\) to these conjectures must be a snark and an offending dominating cycle \(C\) must be stable. It is then shown by a construction that such structures \((G,C)\) indeed exist. In fact, for every even \(n\geq 82\), there exists a snark of order \(n\) having a stable dominating circuit.