Related papers: The smallest nontrivial snarks of oddness 4
The family of snarks -- connected bridgeless cubic graphs that cannot be 3-edge-coloured -- is well-known as a potential source of counterexamples to several important and long-standing conjectures in graph theory. These include the cycle…
A snark is a bridgeless cubic graph which is not 3-edge-colourable. The oddness of a bridgeless cubic graph is the minimum number of odd components in any 2-factor of the graph. Lukot'ka, M\'acajov\'a, Maz\'ak and \v{S}koviera showed in…
We estimate the minimum number of vertices of a cubic graph with given oddness and cyclic connectivity. We prove that a bridgeless cubic graph $G$ with oddness $\omega(G)$ other than the Petersen graph has at least $5.41\cdot\omega(G)$…
The colouring defect of a cubic graph, introduced by Steffen in 2015, is the minimum number of edges that are left uncovered by any set of three perfect matchings. Since a cubic graph has defect $0$ if and only if it is $3$-edge-colourable,…
The essential requirement for a cubic graph to be called a snark is that it can not be edge-coloured with three colours. To avoid trivial cases, varying restrictions on the connectivity are imposed. Snarks are not only interesting in…
In this note we construct two infinite snark families which have high oddness and low circumference compared to the number of vertices. Using this construction, we also give a counterexample to a suggested strengthening of Fulkerson's…
A {\em snark} is a cubic cyclically 4-edge connected graph with edge chromatic number four and girth at least five. We say that a graph $G$ is {\em odd 2-factored} if for each 2-factor F of G each cycle of F is odd. In this paper, we…
We present a construction which shows that there is an infinite set of cyclically 4-edge connected cubic graphs on $n$ vertices with no cycle longer than $c_4 n$ for $c_4=\frac{12}{13}$, and at the same time prove that a certain natural…
A snark -- connected cubic graph with chromatic index $4$ -- is critical if the graph resulting from the removal of any pair of distinct adjacent vertices is $3$-edge-colourable; it is bicritical if the same is true for any pair of distinct…
The colouring defect of a cubic graph is the smallest number of edges left uncovered by any set of three perfect matchings. While $3$-edge-colourable graphs have defect $0$, those that cannot be $3$-edge-coloured (that is, snarks) are known…
The aim of this paper is to classify all snarks up to order $36$ and explain the reasons of their uncolourability. The crucial part of our approach is a computer-assisted structural analysis of cyclically $5$-connected critical snarks,…
The problem of establishing the number of perfect matchings necessary to cover the edge-set of a cubic bridgeless graph is strictly related to a famous conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson. In this paper we prove that deciding whether this…
In this paper we further our understanding of the structure of class two cubic graphs, or snarks, as they are commonly known. We do this by investigating their 3-critical subgraphs, or as we will call them, minimal conflicting subgraphs. We…
For many of the unsolved problems concerning cycles and matchings in graphs it is known that it is sufficient to prove them for \emph{snarks}, the class of nontrivial 3-regular graphs which cannot be 3-edge coloured. In the first part of…
Snarks are $2$-connected cubic graphs that do not admit a proper $3$-edge-coloring. For a cubic graph $G$, its resistance $r(G)$ is the minimum number of edges whose removal results in a $3$-edge-colorable graph, while its flow resistance…
Many conjectures and open problems in graph theory can either be reduced to cubic graphs or are directly stated for cubic graphs. Furthermore, it is known that for a lot of problems, a counterexample must be a snark, i.e. a bridgeless cubic…
The circumference $c(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the length of a longest cycle. By exploiting our recent results on resistance of snarks, we construct infinite classes of cyclically $4$-, $5$- and $6$-edge-connected cubic graphs with…
We describe two new algorithms for the generation of all non-isomorphic cubic graphs with girth at least $k\ge 5$ which are very efficient for $5\le k \le 7$ and show how these algorithms can be efficiently restricted to generate snarks…
We present an algorithm for the efficient generation of all pairwise non-isomorphic cycle permutation graphs, i.e. cubic graphs with a $2$-factor consisting of two chordless cycles, non-hamiltonian cycle permutation graphs and permutation…
Let $G$ be a bridgeless cubic graph. The \textit{resistance} of $G$, denoted $r(G)$, is the minimum number of edges which can be removed from $G$ in order to render 3-edge-colourability. The \textit{oddness} of $G$, denoted $\omega(G)$, is…