English

On Gallai's and Haj\'os' Conjectures for graphs with treewidth at most 3

Combinatorics 2017-06-15 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

A path (resp. cycle) decomposition of a graph GG is a set of edge-disjoint paths (resp. cycles) of GG that covers the edge set of GG. Gallai (1966) conjectured that every graph on nn vertices admits a path decomposition of size at most (n+1)/2\lfloor (n+1)/2\rfloor, and Haj\'os (1968) conjectured that every Eulerian graph on nn vertices admits a cycle decomposition of size at most (n1)/2\lfloor (n-1)/2\rfloor. Gallai's Conjecture was verified for many classes of graphs. In particular, Lov\'asz (1968) verified this conjecture for graphs with at most one vertex of even degree, and Pyber (1996) verified it for graphs in which every cycle contains a vertex of odd degree. Haj\'os' Conjecture, on the other hand, was verified only for graphs with maximum degree 44 and for planar graphs. In this paper, we verify Gallai's and Haj\'os' Conjectures for graphs with treewidth at most 33. Moreover, we show that the only graphs with treewidth at most 33 that do not admit a path decomposition of size at most n/2\lfloor n/2\rfloor are isomorphic to K3K_3 or K5eK_5-e. Finally, we use the technique developed in this paper to present new proofs for Gallai's and Haj\'os' Conjectures for graphs with maximum degree at most 44, and for planar graphs with girth at least 66.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.04334,
  title  = {On Gallai's and Haj\'os' Conjectures for graphs with treewidth at most 3},
  author = {Fábio Botler and Maycon Sambinelli and Rafael S. Coelho and Orlando Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.04334},
  year   = {2017}
}