English

Long cycles and spectral radii in planar graphs

Combinatorics 2024-06-03 v1

Abstract

There is a rich history of studying the existence of cycles in planar graphs. The famous Tutte theorem on the Hamilton cycle states that every 4-connected planar graph contains a Hamilton cycle. Later on, Thomassen (1983), Thomas and Yu (1994) and Sanders (1996) respectively proved that every 4-connected planar graph contains a cycle of length n1,n2n-1, n-2 and n3n-3. Chen, Fan and Yu (2004) further conjectured that every 4-connected planar graph contains a cycle of length \ell for {n,n1,,n25}\ell\in\{n,n-1,\ldots,n-25\} and they verified that {n4,n5,n6}\ell\in \{n-4, n-5, n-6\}. When we remove the ``4-connected" condition, how to guarantee the existence of a long cycle in a planar graph? A natural question asks by adding a spectral radius condition: What is the smallest constant CC such that for sufficiently large nn, every graph GG of order nn with spectral radius greater than CC contains a long cycle in a planar graph? In this paper, we give a stronger answer to the above question. Let GG be a planar graph with order n1.8×1017n\geq 1.8\times 10^{17} and klog2(n3)8k\leq \lfloor\log_2(n-3)\rfloor-8 be a non-negative integer, we show that if ρ(G)ρ(K2(Pn2k42Pk+1))\rho(G)\geq \rho(K_2\vee(P_{n-2k-4}\cup 2P_{k+1})) then GG contains a cycle of length \ell for every {nk,nk1,,3}\ell\in \{n-k, n-k-1, \ldots, 3\} unless GK2(Pn2k42Pk+1)G\cong K_2\vee(P_{n-2k-4}\cup 2P_{k+1}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.20766,
  title  = {Long cycles and spectral radii in planar graphs},
  author = {Ping Xu and Huiqiu Lin and Longfei Fang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20766},
  year   = {2024}
}