A Tight Lower Bound on Cubic Vertices and Upper Bounds on Thin and Non-thin edges in Planar Braces
Abstract
For a subset of the vertex set of a graph , we denote the set of edges of which have exactly one end in by and refer to it as the cut of or edge cut . A graph is called matching covered if . A cut of a matching covered graph is a separating cut if and only if, given any edge , there is a perfect matching of such that and . A cut in a matching covered graph is a tight cut of if for every perfect matching of . For, , we denote the set of edges of which have one endpoint in and the other endpoint in by . Let be an edge cut, where . An edge cut is trivial if or . 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 in a brace is \emph{thin} if, for every tight cut of , or . Carvalho, Lucchesi and Murty conjectured that there exists a positive constant such that every brace has 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}
}