| Authors: L. Jin, G. Mazzuoccolo, E. Steffen Title: Cores, joins and the Fano-flow conjectures Source: Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theory Received 20.01.2016, Revised 24.10.2016, Accepted 26.10.2016, doi: 10.7151/dmgt.1999 | |
Abstract: The Fan-Raspaud Conjecture states that every bridgeless cubic graph has three 1-factors with empty intersection. A weaker one than this conjecture is that every bridgeless cubic graph has two 1-factors and one join with empty intersection. Both of these two conjectures can be related to conjectures on Fano-flows. In this paper, we show that these two conjectures are equivalent to some statements on cores and weak cores of a bridgeless cubic graph. In particular, we prove that the Fan-Raspaud Conjecture is equivalent to a conjecture proposed in [E. Steffen, 1-factor and cycle covers of cubic graphs, J. Graph Theory 78 (2015) 195--206]. Furthermore, we disprove a conjecture proposed in [G. Mazzuoccolo, New conjectures on perfect matchings in cubic graphs, Electron. Notes Discrete Math. 40 (2013) 235--238] and we propose a new version of it under a stronger connectivity assumption. The weak oddness of a cubic graph G is the minimum number of odd components (i.e., with an odd number of vertices) in the complement of a join of G. We obtain an upper bound of weak oddness in terms of weak cores, and thus an upper bound of oddness in terms of cores as a by-product. | |
| Keywords: cubic graphs, Fan-Raspaud Conjecture, cores, weak-cores | |
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