English

A Tight Lower Bound on Cubic Vertices and Upper Bounds on Thin and Non-thin edges in Planar Braces

Combinatorics 2025-10-30 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

For a subset XX of the vertex set \VV(\GG)\VV(\GG) of a graph \GG\GG, we denote the set of edges of \GG\GG which have exactly one end in XX by (X)\partial(X) and refer to it as the cut of XX or edge cut (X)\partial(X). A graph \GG=(\VV,\EE)\GG=(\VV,\EE) is called matching covered if e\EE(\GG), a perfect matching M of \GG s. t. eM\forall e \in \EE(\GG), ~\exists \text{a perfect matching }M \text{ of }\GG \text{ s. t. } e \in M. A cut CC of a matching covered graph \GG\GG is a separating cut if and only if, given any edge ee, there is a perfect matching MeM_{e} of \GG\GG such that eMee \in M_{e} and CMe=1|C \cap M_{e}| = 1. A cut CC in a matching covered graph \GG\GG is a tight cut of \GG\GG if CM=1|C \cap M| = 1 for every perfect matching MM of \GG\GG. For, X,Y\VV(\GG)X, Y \subseteq \VV(\GG), we denote the set of edges of \EE(\GG)\EE(\GG) which have one endpoint in XX and the other endpoint in YY by E[X,Y]E[X,Y]. Let (X)=E[X,X]\partial(X)=E[X,\overline{X}] be an edge cut, where X=\VV(\GG)X\overline{X}=\VV(\GG) \setminus X. An edge cut is trivial if X=1|X|=1 or X=1|\overline{X}|=1. A matching covered graph, which is free of nontrivial tight cuts, is a brace if it is bipartite and is a brick if it is non-bipartite. An edge ee in a brace \GG\GG is \emph{thin} if, for every tight cut (X)\partial(X) of \GGe\GG - e, X3|X| \le 3 or X3|\overline{X}| \le 3. Carvalho, Lucchesi and Murty conjectured that there exists a positive constant cc such that every brace \GG\GG has c\VV(\GG)c|\VV(\GG)| thin edges \cite{DBLP:journals/combinatorics/LucchesiCM15}. He and Lu \cite{HE2025153} showed a lower bound of thin edges in a brace in terms of the number of cubic vertices. We asked whether any planar brace exists that does not contain any cubic vertices. We answer negatively by showing that such set of planar braces is empty. We have been able to show a quantitively tight lower bound on the number of cubic vertices in a planar brace. We have proved tight upper bounds of nonthin edges and thin edges in a planar brace.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.25188,
  title  = {A Tight Lower Bound on Cubic Vertices and Upper Bounds on Thin and Non-thin edges in Planar Braces},
  author = {Koustav De},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.25188},
  year   = {2025}
}