English

Morphology of small snarks

Discrete Mathematics 2021-12-09 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to classify all snarks up to order 3636 and explain the reasons of their uncolourability. The crucial part of our approach is a computer-assisted structural analysis of cyclically 55-connected critical snarks, which is justified by the fact that every other snark can be constructed from them by a series of simple operations while preserving uncolourability. Our results reveal that most of the analysed snarks are built up from pieces of the Petersen graph and can be naturally distributed into a small number of classes having the same reason for uncolourability. This sheds new light on the structure of all small snarks. Based on our analysis, we generalise certain individual snarks to infinite families and identify a rich family of cyclically 55-connected critical snarks.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2112.04335,
  title  = {Morphology of small snarks},
  author = {Ján Mazák and Jozef Rajník and Martin Škoviera},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.04335},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:09:09.135Z