English

The minimum degree of minimal 2-extendable claw-free graphs

Combinatorics 2025-10-07 v1

Abstract

A connected graph GG with a perfect matching is said to be kk-extendable for integers kk, 1kV(G)211 \leq k\leq \frac{|V(G)|}{2}-1, if any matching in GG of size kk is contained in a perfect matching of GG. A kk-extendable graph is minimal if the deletion of any edge results in a graph that is not kk-extendable. In 1994, Plummer proved that every kk-extendable claw-free graph has minimum degree at least 2k2k. Recently, He et al. showed that every minimal 1-extendable graph has minimum degree 2 or 3. In this paper, we prove that the minimum degree of a minimal 2-extendable claw-free graph is either 44 or 55.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.03554,
  title  = {The minimum degree of minimal 2-extendable claw-free graphs},
  author = {Jing Guo and Fuliang Lu and Heping Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.03554},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages, 8 figures