English

Integer flows on triangularly connected signed graphs

Combinatorics 2023-10-23 v1

Abstract

A triangle-path in a graph GG is a sequence of distinct triangles T1,T2,,TmT_1,T_2,\ldots,T_m in GG such that for any i,ji, j with 1i<jm1\leq i < j \leq m, E(Ti)E(Ti+1)=1|E(T_i)\cap E(T_{i+1})|=1 and E(Ti)E(Tj)=E(T_i)\cap E(T_j)=\emptyset if j>i+1j > i+1. A connected graph GG is triangularly connected if for any two nonparallel edges ee and ee' there is a triangle-path T1T2TmT_1T_2\cdots T_m such that eE(T1)e\in E(T_1) and eE(Tm)e'\in E(T_m). For ordinary graphs, Fan {\it et al.}~(J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 98 (2008) 1325-1336) characterize all triangularly connected graphs that admit nowhere-zero 33-flows or 44-flows. Corollaries of this result include integer flow of some families of ordinary graphs, such as, locally connected graphs due to Lai (J. Graph Theory 42 (2003) 211-219) and some types of products of graphs due to Imrich et al.(J. Graph Theory 64 (2010) 267-276). In this paper, Fan's result for triangularly connected graphs is further extended to signed graphs. We proved that every flow-admissible triangularly connected signed graph admits a nowhere-zero 44-flow if and only if it is not the wheel W5W_5 associated with a specific signature. Moreover, this result is sharp since there are infinitely many unbalanced triangularly connected signed graphs admitting a nowhere-zero 44-flow but not 33-flow.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13504,
  title  = {Integer flows on triangularly connected signed graphs},
  author = {Liangchen Li and Chong Li and Rong Luo and Cun-Quan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13504},
  year   = {2023}
}