English

A note on two cycles of consecutive even lengths in graphs

Combinatorics 2025-06-11 v1

Abstract

Bondy and Vince proved that a graph of minimum degree at least three contains two cycles whose lengths differ by one or two, which was conjectured by Erd\H{o}s. Gao, Li, Ma and Xie gave an average degree counterpart of Bondy-Vince's result, stating that every nn-vertex graph with at least 52(n1)\frac{5}{2}(n-1) edges contains two cycles of consecutive even lengths, unless 4(n1)4|(n-1) and every block of GG is a clique K5K_5. This confirms the case k=2k=2 of Verstra\"ete's conjecture, which states that every nn-vertex graph without kk cycles of consecutive even lengths has edge number e(G)12(2k+1)(n1)e(G)\leq\frac{1}{2}(2k+1)(n-1), with equality if and only if every block of GG is a clique of order 2k+12k+1. Sudakov and Verstra\"{e}te further conjectured that if GG is a graph with maximum number of edges that does not contain kk cycles of consecutive even lengths, then every block of GG is a clique of order at most 2k+12k+1. In this paper, we prove the case k=2k=2 for Sudakov-Verstra\"{e}te's conjecture, by extending the results of Gao, Li, Ma and Xie.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.08692,
  title  = {A note on two cycles of consecutive even lengths in graphs},
  author = {Binlong Li and Yufeng Pan and Lingjuan Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08692},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:08:54.976Z