English

On the hamiltonicity problem of bicirculants: a reduction to cyclic Haar graphs

Combinatorics 2026-04-24 v1

Abstract

A bicirculant is a regular graph that admits an automorphism having two vertex-orbits of the same size. A bicirculant can be described as follows. Given an integer m1m \ge 1 and sets R,S,TZmR, S, T \subseteq \mathbb Z_m such that R=RR=-R, T=TT=-T, 0∉RT0 \not\in R \cup T and 0S0 \in S, the graph B(m;R,S,T)B(m;R,S,T) has vertex set V={u0,,um1,v0,,vm1}V=\{u_0,\dots,u_{m-1},v_0,\dots,v_m-1\} and edge set E={uiui+j iZm,jR}{vivi+j iZm,jT}{uivi+j iZm,jS}.E=\{u_iu_{i+j}| \ i \in\mathbb Z_m, j \in R\} \cup \{v_iv_{i+j}| \ i \in\mathbb Z_m, j \in T\} \cup\{u_iv_{i+j}| \ i \in\mathbb Z_m, j \in S\}. Bicirculant graphs with R=T=R=T=\emptyset are known as cyclic Haar graphs. In 2025 we conjectured that the only non-hamiltonian graphs among regular connected bicirculants of degree more than one are the generalized Petersen graphs G(m,2)G(m,2) with m5(mod6)m \equiv 5 \pmod 6. Recently we have verified the conjecture for bicirculants with S2|S|\le 2 and for bicirculants with R=T|R|=|T| odd. In this paper we show that the conjecture holds for all bicirculants with S3|S| \le 3 and for all bicirculants with S4|S| \ge 4 and m/gcd(m,S)m/\gcd(m, S) even. As a byproduct of our results, we prove that every connected bicirculant graph on 2m2m vertices with S4|S| \ge 4 is hamiltonian for even m<9240m< 9\, 240, and for odd m<3465m< 3\,465. Finally, we show that the existence of a hamilton cycle in every connected cyclic Haar graph of valence at least 44 implies that every connected bicirculant graph of valence at least 44 is hamiltonian.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.21607,
  title  = {On the hamiltonicity problem of bicirculants: a reduction to cyclic Haar graphs},
  author = {Simona Bonvicini and Tomaž Pisanski and Arjana Žitnik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21607},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 3 figures