Girth, oddness, and colouring defect of snarks

DOI10.1016/J.DISC.2022.113040zbMATH Open1495.05097arXiv2106.12205OpenAlexW3175789691MaRDI QIDQ2166293FDOQ2166293

Authors: Ján Karabáš, E. Máčajová, Roman Nedela, Martin Škoviera 

Publication date: 24 August 2022

Published in: Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The colouring defect of a cubic graph, introduced by Steffen in 2015, is the minimum number of edges that are left uncovered by any set of three perfect matchings. Since a cubic graph has defect $0$ if and only if it is $3$-edge-colourable, this invariant can measure how much a cubic graph differs from a $3$-edge-colourable graph. Our aim is to examine the relationship of colouring defect to oddness, an extensively studied measure of uncolourability of cubic graphs, defined as the smallest number of odd circuits in a $2$-factor. We show that there exist cyclically $5$-edge-connected snarks (cubic graphs with no $3$-edge-colouring) of oddness $2$ and arbitrarily large colouring defect. This result is achieved by means of a construction of cyclically $5$-edge-connected snarks with oddness $2$ and arbitrarily large girth. The fact that our graphs are cyclically $5$-edge-connected significantly strengthens a similar result of Jin and Steffen (2017), which only guarantees graphs with cyclic connectivity at most $3$. At the same time, our result improves Kochol's original construction of snarks with large girth (1996) in that it provides infinitely many nontrivial snarks of any prescribed girth $gge5$, not just girth at least~$g$.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12205

Recommendations

• The smallest nontrivial snarks of oddness 4
• Snarks without small cycles
• Relating embedding and coloring properties of snarks
• Snarks with large oddness and small number of vertices
• Small snarks with large oddness

zbMATH Keywords

girthoddnesssnarkcolouring defect

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Coloring of graphs and hypergraphs (05C15)

Cites Work

• Decompositions and reductions of snarks
• Classification and characterizations of snarks
• Measurements of edge-uncolorability
• Snarks without small cycles
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Fulkerson's conjecture and circuit covers
• Sparsely intersecting perfect matchings in cubic graphs
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Regular maps on surfaces with large planar width
• Intersecting 1-factors and nowhere-zero 5-flows
• Superposition and constructions of graphs without nowhere-zero \(k\)-flows
• Measures of edge-uncolorability of cubic graphs
• Small snarks with large oddness
• Petersen cores and the oddness of cubic graphs
• Decomposition of snarks
• 1-factor and cycle covers of cubic graphs
• Reduction of the Berge-Fulkerson conjecture to cyclically 5-edge-connected snarks
• Superposition of snarks revisited

Cited In (3)

• Snarks with large oddness and small number of vertices
• Relating embedding and coloring properties of snarks
• Cubic graphs with colouring defect 3

This page was built for publication: Girth, oddness, and colouring defect of snarks

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2166293)