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Let $G$ be a bridgeless cubic graph. In 2023, the three authors solved a conjecture (also known as the $S_4$-Conjecture) made by Mazzuoccolo in 2013: there exist two perfect matchings of $G$ such that the complement of their union is a bipartite subgraph of $G$. They actually show that given any $1^+$-factor $F$ (a spanning subgraph of $G$ such that its vertices have degree at least 1) and an arbitrary edge $e$ of $G$, there exists a perfect matching $M$ of $G$ containing $e$ such that $G\setminus (F\cup M)$ is bipartite. This is a step closer to comprehend better the Fan--Raspaud Conjecture and eventually the Berge--Fulkerson Conjecture. The $S_4$-Conjecture, now a theorem, is also the weakest assertion in a series of three conjectures made by Mazzuoccolo in 2013, with the next stronger statement being: there exist two perfect matchings of $G$ such that the complement of their union is an acyclic subgraph of $G$. Unfortunately, this conjecture is not true: Jin, Steffen, and Mazzuoccolo later showed that there exists a counterexample admitting 2-cuts. Here we show that, despite of this, every cyclically 3-edge-connected cubic graph satisfies this second conjecture., Comment: 21 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2204.10021

Let $G$ be a bridgeless cubic graph. The Berge--Fulkerson Conjecture (1970s) states that $G$ admits a list of six perfect matchings such that each edge of $G$ belongs to exactly two of these perfect matchings. If answered in the affirmative, two other recent conjectures would also be true: the Fan--Raspaud Conjecture (1994), which states that $G$ admits three perfect matchings such that every edge of $G$ belongs to at most two of them; and a conjecture by Mazzuoccolo (2013), which states that $G$ admits two perfect matchings whose deletion yields a bipartite subgraph of $G$. It can be shown that given an arbitrary perfect matching of $G$, it is not always possible to extend it to a list of three or six perfect matchings satisfying the statements of the Fan--Raspaud and the Berge--Fulkerson conjectures, respectively. In this paper, we show that given any $1^+$-factor $F$ (a spanning subgraph of $G$ such that its vertices have degree at least 1) and an arbitrary edge $e$ of $G$, there always exists a perfect matching $M$ of $G$ containing $e$ such that $G\setminus (F\cup M)$ is bipartite. Our result implies Mazzuoccolo's conjecture, but not only. It also implies that given any collection of disjoint odd circuits in $G$, there exists a perfect matching of $G$ containing at least one edge of each circuit in this collection., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures

For an integer $k \geq 1$ and a graph $G$, let $\mathcal{K}_k(G)$ be the graph that has vertex set all proper $k$-colorings of $G$, and an edge between two vertices $\alpha$ and~$\beta$ whenever the coloring~$\beta$ can be obtained from $\alpha$ by a single Kempe change. A theorem of Meyniel from 1978 states that $\mathcal{K}_5(G)$ is connected with diameter $O(5^{|V(G)|})$ for every planar graph $G$. We significantly strengthen this result, by showing that there is a positive constant $c$ such that $\mathcal{K}_5(G)$ has diameter $O(|V(G)|^c)$ for every planar graph $G$., Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure

We prove that planar graphs of maximum degree 3 and of girth at least 7 are 3-edge-colorable, extending the previous result for girth at least 8 by Kronk, Radlowski, and Franen from 1974., Comment: 7 pages plus 6 pages of annex; 11 figures

A circular $r$-coloring of a signed graph $(G, \sigma)$ is an assignment $\phi$ of points of a circle $C_r$ of circumference $r$ to the vertices of $(G, \sigma)$ such that for each positive edge $uv$ of $(G, \sigma)$ the distance of $\phi(v)$ and $\phi(v)$ is at least 1 and for each negative edge $uv$ the distance of $\phi(u)$ from the antipodal of $\phi(v)$ is at least 1. The circular chromatic number of $(G, \sigma)$, denoted $\chi_c(G, \sigma)$, is the infimum of $r$ such that $(G, \sigma)$ admits a circular $r$-coloring. This notion is recently defined by Naserasr, Wang, and Zhu who, among other results, proved that for any signed $d$-degenerate simple graph $\hat{G}$ we have $\chi_c(\hat{G})\leq 2d$. For $d\geq 3$, examples of signed $d$-degenerate simple graphs of circular chromatic number $2d$ are provided. But for $d=2$ only examples of signed 2-degenerate simple graphs of circular chromatic number close enough to $4$ are given, noting that these examples are also signed bipartite planar graphs. In this work we first observe the following restatement of the 4-color theorem: If $(G,\sigma)$ is a signed bipartite planar simple graph where vertices of one part are all of degree 2, then $\chi_c(G,\sigma)\leq \frac{16}{5}$. Motivated by this observation, we provide an improved upper bound of $ 4-\dfrac{2}{\lfloor \frac{n+1}{2} \rfloor}$ for the circular chromatic number of a signed 2-degenerate simple graph on $n$ vertices and an improved upper bound of $ 4-\dfrac{4}{\lfloor \frac{n+2}{2} \rfloor}$ for the circular chromatic number of a signed bipartite planar simple graph on $n$ vertices. We then show that each of the bounds is tight for any value of $n\geq 4$.

We initiate a systematic study of the fractional vertex-arboricity of planar graphs and demonstrate connections to open problems concerning both fractional coloring and the size of the largest induced forest in planar graphs. In particular, the following three long-standing conjectures concern the size of a largest induced forest in a planar graph, and we conjecture that each of these can be generalized to the setting of fractional vertex-arboricity. In 1979, Albertson and Berman conjectured that every planar graph has an induced forest on at least half of its vertices, in 1987, Akiyama and Watanabe conjectured that every bipartite planar graph has an induced forest on at least five-eighths of its vertices, and in 2010, Kowalik, Lu\v{z}ar, and \v{S}krekovski conjectured that every planar graph of girth at least five has an induced forest on at least seven-tenths of its vertices. We make progress toward the fractional generalization of the latter of these, by proving that every planar graph of girth at least five has fractional vertex-arboricity at most $2 - 1/324$., Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures

A fullerene graph is a 3-connected cubic planar graph with pentagonal and hexagonal faces. The leapfrog transformation of a planar graph produces the trucation of the dual of the given graph. A fullerene graph is leapfrog if it can be obtained from another fullerene graph by the leapfrog transformation. We prove that leapfrog fullerene graphs on $n=12k-6$ vertices have at least $2^{k}$ Hamilton cycles.

There are several ways to generalize graph coloring to signed graphs. M\'a\v{c}ajov\'a, Raspaud and \v{S}koviera introduced one of them and conjectured that in this setting, for signed planar graphs four colors are always enough, generalising thereby The Four Color Theorem. We disprove the conjecture.

An 'induced restriction' of a simple binary matroid $M$ is a restriction $M|F$, where $F$ is a flat of $M$. We consider the class $\mathcal{M}$ of all simple binary matroids $M$ containing neither a free matroid on three elements (which we call a 'claw'), nor a Fano plane as an induced restriction. We give an exact structure theorem for this class; two of its consequences are that the matroids in $\mathcal{M}$ have unbounded critical number, while the matroids in $\mathcal{M}$ not containing the clique $M(K_5)$ as an induced restriction have critical number at most $2$.

The model theory based notion of the first order convergence unifies the notions of the left-convergence for dense structures and the Benjamini-Schramm convergence for sparse structures. It is known that every first order convergent sequence of graphs with bounded tree-depth can be represented by an analytic limit object called a limit modeling. We establish the matroid counterpart of this result: every first order convergent sequence of matroids with bounded branch-depth representable over a fixed finite field has a limit modeling, i.e., there exists an infinite matroid with the elements forming a probability space that has asymptotically the same first order properties. We show that neither of the bounded branch-depth assumption nor the representability assumption can be removed., Comment: Accepted to the European Journal of Combinatorics

Fullerene graphs, i.e., 3-connected planar cubic graphs with pentagonal and hexagonal faces, are conjectured to be Hamiltonian. This is a special case of a conjecture of Barnette and Goodey, stating that 3-connected planar graphs with faces of size at most 6 are Hamiltonian. We prove the conjecture.

The saturation number of a graph $G$ is the cardinality of any smallest maximal matching of $G$, and it is denoted by $s(G)$. Fullerene graphs are cubic planar graphs with exactly twelve 5-faces; all the other faces are hexagons. They are used to capture the structure of carbon molecules. Here we show that the saturation number of fullerenes on $n$ vertices is essentially $n/3$.

We show that for every cubic graph G with sufficiently large girth there exists a probability distribution on edge-cuts of G such that each edge is in a randomly chosen cut with probability at least 0.88672. This implies that G contains an edge-cut of size at least 1.33008n, where n is the number of vertices of G, and has fractional cut covering number at most 1.127752. The lower bound on the size of maximum edge-cut also applies to random cubic graphs. Specifically, a random n-vertex cubic graph a.a.s. contains an edge cut of size 1.33008n.

We show that every cubic bridgeless graph G has at least 2^(|V(G)|/3656) perfect matchings. This confirms an old conjecture of Lovasz and Plummer. This version of the paper uses a different definition of a burl from the journal version of the paper and a different proof of Lemma 18 is given. This simplifies the exposition of our arguments throughout the whole paper.

A subset S of vertices of a graph G is called a k-path vertex cover if every path of order k in G contains at least one vertex from S. Denote by \psi_k(G) the minimum cardinality of a k-path vertex cover in G. It is shown that the problem of determining \psi_k(G) is NP-hard for each k \geq 2, while for trees the problem can be solved in linear time. We investigate upper bounds on the value of \psi_k(G) and provide several estimations and exact values of \psi_k(G). We also prove that \psi_3(G) \leq (2n + m)/6, for every graph G with n vertices and m edges., Comment: submitted manuscript

We show that every (sub)cubic n-vertex graph with sufficiently large girth has fractional chromatic number at most 2.2978 which implies that it contains an independent set of size at least 0.4352n. Our bound on the independence number is valid to random cubic graphs as well as it improves existing lower bounds on the maximum cut in cubic graphs with large girth.

Reed conjectured that for every $\varepsilon>0$ and every integer $\Delta$, there exists $g$ such that the fractional total chromatic number of every graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ and girth at least $g$ is at most $\Delta+1+\varepsilon$. The conjecture was proven to be true when $\Delta=3$ or $\Delta$ is even. We settle the conjecture by proving it for the remaining cases., Comment: A typo has been corrected in the introduction (concerning the citation of the result by Ito, Kennedy and Reed)

A fullerene graph is a planar cubic 3-connected graph with only pentagonal and hexagonal faces. We show that fullerene graphs have exponentially many perfect matchings., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures