Dominating Cycles and Forbidden Pairs Containing $$P_{5}$$

A cycle C in a graph G is dominating if every edge of G is incident with at least one vertex of C. For a set \(\mathcal {H}\) of connected graphs, a graph G is said to be \(\mathcal {H}\)-free if G does not contain any member of \(\mathcal {H}\) as an induced subgraph. When \(|\mathcal {H}| = 2, \mathcal {H}\) is called a forbidden pair. In this paper, we investigate the characterization of the class of the forbidden pairs guaranteeing the existence of a dominating cycle and show the following two results: (i) Every 2-connected \(\{P_{5}, K_{4}^{-}\}\)-free graph contains a longest cycle which is a dominating cycle. (ii) Every 2-connected \(\{P_{5}, W^{*}\}\)-free graph contains a longest cycle which is a dominating cycle. Here \(P_{5}\) is the path of order \(5, K_{4}^{-}\) is the graph obtained from the complete graph of order 4 by removing one edge, and \(W^{*}\) is the graph obtained from two triangles and an edge by identifying one vertex in each.