Edge‐Disjoint Spanning Trees,Edge Connectivity,and Eigenvalues in Graphs

Let and denote the second largest eigenvalue and the maximum number of edge‐disjoint spanning trees of a graph G, respectively. Motivated by a question of Seymour on the relationship between eigenvalues of a graph G and bounds of , Cioab? and Wong conjectured that for any integers and a d‐regular graph G, if , then . They proved the conjecture for , and presented evidence for the cases when . Thus the conjecture remains open for . We propose a more general conjecture that for a graph G with minimum degree , if , then . In this article, we prove that for a graph G with minimum degree δ, each of the following holds.

• (i) For , if and , then .
• (ii) For , if and , then .

Our results sharpen theorems of Cioab? and Wong and give a partial solution to Cioab? and Wong's conjecture and Seymour's problem. We also prove that for a graph G with minimum degree , if , then the edge connectivity is at least k, which generalizes a former result of Cioab?. As corollaries, we investigate the Laplacian and signless Laplacian eigenvalue conditions on and edge connectivity.     

Strong Chromatic Index of Sparse Graphs

A coloring of the edges of a graph G is strong if each color class is an induced matching of G. The strong chromatic index of G, denoted by , is the least number of colors in a strong edge coloring of G. Chang and Narayanan (J Graph Theory 73(2) (2013), 119–126) proved recently that for a 2‐degenerate graph G. They also conjectured that for any k‐degenerate graph G there is a linear bound , where c is an absolute constant. This conjecture is confirmed by the following three papers: in (G. Yu, Graphs Combin 31 (2015), 1815–1818), Yu showed that . In (M. Debski, J. Grytczuk, M. Sleszynska‐Nowak, Inf Process Lett 115(2) (2015), 326–330), D?bski, Grytczuk, and ?leszyńska‐Nowak showed that . In (T. Wang, Discrete Math 330(6) (2014), 17–19), Wang proved that . If G is a partial k‐tree, in (M. Debski, J. Grytczuk, M. Sleszynska‐Nowak, Inf Process Lett 115(2) (2015), 326–330), it is proven that . Let be the line graph of a graph G, and let be the square of the line graph . Then . We prove that if a graph G has an orientation with maximum out‐degree k, then has coloring number at most . If G is a k‐tree, then has coloring number at most . As a consequence, a graph with has , and a k‐tree G has .     

Classification of Vertex‐Transitive Cubic Partial Cubes

Partial cubes are graphs isometrically embeddable into hypercubes. In this article, it is proved that every cubic, vertex‐transitive partial cube is isomorphic to one of the following graphs: , for , the generalized Petersen graph G (10, 3), the cubic permutahedron, the truncated cuboctahedron, or the truncated icosidodecahedron. This classification is a generalization of results of Bre?ar et  al. (Eur J Combin 25 (2004), 55–64) on cubic mirror graphs; it includes all cubic, distance‐regular partial cubes (P. M. Weichsel, Discrete Math 109 (1992), 297–306), and presents a contribution to the classification of all cubic partial cubes.     

Polychromatic colorings of complete graphs with respect to 1‐, 2‐factors and Hamiltonian cycles

If G is a graph and is a set of subgraphs of G, then an edge‐coloring of G is called ‐polychromatic if every graph from gets all colors present in G. The ‐polychromatic number of G, denoted , is the largest number of colors such that G has an ‐polychromatic coloring. In this article, is determined exactly when G is a complete graph and is the family of all 1‐factors. In addition is found up to an additive constant term when G is a complete graph and is the family of all 2‐factors, or the family of all Hamiltonian cycles.     

A simple formula for the number of spanning trees of line graphs

Suppose is a loopless graph and is the graph obtained from G by subdividing each of its edges k () times. Let be the set of all spanning trees of G, be the line graph of the graph and be the number of spanning trees of . By using techniques from electrical networks, we first obtain the following simple formula: Then we find it is in fact equivalent to a complicated formula obtained recently using combinatorial techniques in [F. M. Dong and W. G. Yan, Expression for the number of spanning trees of line graphs of arbitrary connected graphs, J. Graph Theory. 85 (2017) 74–93].     

Sufficient conditions for the existence of a path‐factor which are related to odd components

In this article, we are concerned with sufficient conditions for the existence of a ‐factor. We prove that for , there exists such that if a graph G satisfies for all , then G has a ‐factor, where is the number of components C of with . On the other hand, we construct infinitely many graphs G having no ‐factor such that for all .     

Ramsey Results for Cycle Spectra

Let denote the set of lengths of cycles of a graph G of order n and let denote the complement of G. We show that if , then contains all odd ? with and all even ? with , where and denote the maximum odd and the maximum even integer in , respectively. From this we deduce that the set contains at least integers, which is sharp.     

Nonseparating Cycles Avoiding Specific Vertices

Thomassen proved that every ‐connected graph G contains an induced cycle C such that is k‐connected, establishing a conjecture of Lovász. In general, one could ask the following question: For any positive integers , does there exist a smallest positive integer such that for any ‐connected graph G, any with , and any , there is an induced cycle C in such that and is l‐connected? The case when is a well‐known conjecture of Lovász that is still open for . In this article, we prove and . We also consider a weaker version: For any positive integers , is there a smallest positive integer such that for every ‐connected graph G and any with , there is an induced cycle C in such that is l‐connected? The case when was studied by Thomassen. We prove and .     

Edge‐transitive homogeneous factorizations of complete uniform hypergraphs

For a finite set V and a positive integer k with , letting be the set of all k‐subsets of V, the pair is called the complete k‐hypergraph on V, while each k‐subset of V is called an edge. A factorization of the complete k‐hypergraph of index , simply a ‐factorization of order n, is a partition of the edges into s disjoint subsets such that each k‐hypergraph , called a factor, is a spanning subhypergraph of . Such a factorization is homogeneous if there exist two transitive subgroups G and M of the symmetric group of degree n such that G induces a transitive action on the set and M lies in the kernel of this action. In this article, we give a classification of homogeneous factorizations of that admit a group acting transitively on the edges of . It is shown that, for and , there exists an edge‐transitive homogeneous ‐factorization of order n if and only if is one of (32, 3, 5), (32, 3, 31), (33, 4, 5), , and , where and q is a prime power with .     

Dominating sets inducing large components in maximal outerplanar graphs

For a maximal outerplanar graph G of order n at least three, Matheson and Tarjan showed that G has domination number at most . Similarly, for a maximal outerplanar graph G of order n at least five, Dorfling, Hattingh, and Jonck showed, by a completely different approach, that G has total domination number at most unless G is isomorphic to one of two exceptional graphs of order 12. We present a unified proof of a common generalization of these two results. For every positive integer k, we specify a set of graphs of order at least and at most such that every maximal outerplanar graph G of order n at least that does not belong to has a dominating set D of order at most such that every component of the subgraph of G induced by D has order at least k.     

Dynamic choosability of triangle‐free graphs and sparse random graphs

Ther‐dynamic choosability of a graph G, written , is the least k such that whenever each vertex is assigned a list of at least k colors a proper coloring can be chosen from the lists so that every vertex v has at least neighbors of distinct colors. Let ch(G) denote the choice number of G. In this article, we prove when is bounded. We also show that there exists a constant C such that the random graph with almost surely satisfies . Also if G is a triangle‐free regular graph, then we have .     

Full subgraphs

Let be a graph of density p on n vertices. Following Erdős, Łuczak, and Spencer, an m‐vertex subgraph H of G is called full if H has minimum degree at least . Let denote the order of a largest full subgraph of G. If is a nonnegative integer, define Erdős, Łuczak, and Spencer proved that for , In this article, we prove the following lower bound: for , Furthermore, we show that this is tight up to a multiplicative constant factor for infinitely many p near the elements of . In contrast, we show that for any n‐vertex graph G, either G or contains a full subgraph on vertices. Finally, we discuss full subgraphs of random and pseudo‐random graphs, and several open problems.     

Two Questions of Erdős on Hypergraphs above the Turán Threshold

For ordinary graphs it is known that any graph G with more edges than the Turán number of must contain several copies of , and a copy of , the complete graph on vertices with one missing edge. Erd?s asked if the same result is true for , the complete 3‐uniform hypergraph on s vertices. In this note, we show that for small values of n, the number of vertices in G, the answer is negative for . For the second property, that of containing a , we show that for the answer is negative for all large n as well, by proving that the Turán density of is greater than that of .     

Complete graph immersions and minimum degree

An immersion of a graph H in another graph G is a one‐to‐one mapping and a collection of edge‐disjoint paths in G, one for each edge of H, such that the path corresponding to the edge has endpoints and . The immersion is strong if the paths are internally disjoint from . We prove that every simple graph of minimum degree at least contains a strong immersion of the complete graph . This improves on previously known bound of minimum degree at least 200t obtained by DeVos et al. Our result supports a conjecture of Lescure and Meyniel (also independently proposed by Abu‐Khzam and Langston), which is the analogue of famous Hadwiger’s conjecture for immersions and says that every graph without a ‐immersion is ‐colorable.     

Smallest domination number and largest independence number of graphs and forests with given degree sequence

For a sequence d of nonnegative integers, let and be the sets of all graphs and forests with degree sequence d, respectively. Let , , , and where is the domination number and is the independence number of a graph G. Adapting results of Havel and Hakimi, Rao showed in 1979 that can be determined in polynomial time. We establish the existence of realizations with , and with and that have strong structural properties. This leads to an efficient algorithm to determine for every given degree sequence d with bounded entries as well as closed formulas for and .     

The decycling number and maximum genus of cubic graphs

Let and denote the minimum size of a decycling set and maximum genus of a graph G, respectively. For a connected cubic graph G of order n, it is shown that . Applying the formula, we obtain some new results on the decycling number and maximum genus of cubic graphs. Furthermore, it is shown that the number of vertices of a decycling set S in a k‐regular graph G is , where c and are the number of components of and the number of edges in , respectively. Therefore, S is minimum if and only if is minimum. As an application, this leads to a lower bound for of a k‐regular graph G. In many cases this bound may be sharp.     

On a Conjecture of Erdős,Gallai, and Tuza

Erd?s, Gallai, and Tuza posed the following problem: given an n‐vertex graph G, let denote the smallest size of a set of edges whose deletion makes G triangle‐free, and let denote the largest size of a set of edges containing at most one edge from each triangle of G. Is it always the case that ? We have two main results. We first obtain the upper bound , as a partial result toward the Erd?s–Gallai–Tuza conjecture. We also show that always , where m is the number of edges in G; this bound is sharp in several notable cases.     

Star chromatic index of subcubic multigraphs

The star chromatic index of a multigraph G, denoted , is the minimum number of colors needed to properly color the edges of G such that no path or cycle of length four is bicolored. A multigraph G is star k‐edge‐colorable if . Dvořák, Mohar, and Šámal [Star chromatic index, J. Graph Theory 72 (2013), 313–326] proved that every subcubic multigraph is star 7‐edge‐colorable. They conjectured in the same article that every subcubic multigraph should be star 6‐edge‐colorable. In this article, we first prove that it is NP‐complete to determine whether for an arbitrary graph G. This answers a question of Mohar. We then establish some structure results on subcubic multigraphs G with such that but for any , where . We finally apply the structure results, along with a simple discharging method, to prove that every subcubic multigraph G is star 6‐edge‐colorable if , and star 5‐edge‐colorable if , respectively, where is the maximum average degree of a multigraph G. This partially confirms the conjecture of Dvořák, Mohar, and Šámal.     

On an anti‐Ramsey threshold for sparse graphs with one triangle

For graphs G and H, let  denote the property that for every proper edge‐coloring of G (with an arbitrary number of colors) there is a rainbow copy of H in G, that is, a copy of H with no two edges of the same color. The authors (2014) proved that, for every graph H, the threshold function  of this property for the binomial random graph  is asymptotically at most , where denotes the so‐called maximum 2‐density of H. Nenadov et al. (2014) proved that if H is a cycle with at least  seven vertices or a complete graph with at least 19 vertices, then . We show that there exists a fairly rich, infinite family of graphs F containing a triangle such that if for suitable constants and , where , then almost surely. In particular, for any such graph F.