Pseudo and Strongly Pseudo 2--Factor Isomorphic Regular Graphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates pseudo and strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic regular graphs, proving nonexistence results for certain degrees, and constructs infinite families including Flower snarks, expanding understanding of 2--factor properties in regular graphs.

Contribution

It generalizes previous nonexistence results to nonbipartite regular graphs and introduces strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic graphs, providing new constructions and conjectures.

Findings

Pseudo and strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic 2k--regular graphs do not exist for k≥4.

Flower snarks are strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic but not 2--factor isomorphic.

Conjecture: certain snarks are the only cyclically 4--edge--connected graphs with all 2--factors of odd cycles.

Abstract

A graph $G$ is pseudo 2--factor isomorphic if the parity of the number of cycles in a 2--factor is the same for all 2--factors of $G$. In \cite{ADJLS} we proved that pseudo 2--factor isomorphic $k$--regular bipartite graphs exist only for $k \le 3$. In this paper we generalize this result for regular graphs which are not necessarily bipartite. We also introduce strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic graphs and we prove that pseudo and strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic 2k--regular graphs and $k$--regular digraphs do not exist for $k\geq 4$. Moreover, we present constructions of infinite families of regular graphs in these classes. In particular we show that the family of Flower snarks is strongly pseudo 2--factor isomorphic but not 2--factor isomorphic and we conjecture that, together with the Petersen and the Blanu\v{s}a2 graphs, they are the only cyclically 4--edge--connected snarks for which each 2--factor contains only cycles of odd length.