Flow-critical graphs
Abstract
Lov\'{a}sz et al. proved that every -edge-connected graph has a nowhere-zero -flow. In fact, they proved a more technical statement which says that there exists a nowhere zero -flow that extends the flow prescribed on the incident edges of a single vertex with bounded degree. We extend this theorem of Lov\'{a}sz et al. to allow to have arbitrary degree, but with the additional assumption that there is another vertex with large degree and no small cut separating and . Using this theorem, we prove two results regarding the generation of minimal graphs with the property that prescribing the edges incident to a vertex with specific flow does not extend to a nowhere-zero -flow. We use this to further strengthen the theorem of Lov\'{a}sz et al., as well as make progress on a conjecture of Li et al.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.01451,
title = {Flow-critical graphs},
author = {Arnbjörg Soffía Árnadóttir and Zdeněk Dvořák and Bernard Lidický and Benjamin Moore and Evelyne Smith-Roberge and Robert Šámal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.01451},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
52 pages, in Journal of Graph Theory