Spanning Triangle-trees and Flows of Graphs

TL;DR

This paper characterizes graphs with spanning triangle-trees that admit nowhere-zero 3-flows, showing that certain constructions and connectivity conditions guarantee the existence of flows below 3, extending classical flow theorems.

Contribution

It provides a structural characterization of graphs with spanning triangle-trees that admit nowhere-zero 3-flows and generalizes known results on flow properties in such graphs.

Findings

Graphs with spanning triangle-trees and 4-edge-connectivity have a nowhere-zero 3-flow.

Graphs with two edge-disjoint spanning triangle-trees have flows less than 3.

Construction from K4 via bull-growing characterizes graphs without nowhere-zero 3-flows.

Abstract

In this paper we study the flow-property of graphs containing a spanning triangle-tree. Our main results provide a structure characterization of graphs with a spanning triangle-tree admitting a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. All these graphs without nowhere-zero $3$-flows are constructed from $K_4$ by a so-called bull-growing operation. This generalizes a result of Fan et al. in 2008 on triangularly-connected graphs and particularly shows that every $4$-edge-connected graph with a spanning triangle-tree has a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. A well-known classical theorem of Jaeger in 1979 shows that every graph with two edge-disjoint spanning trees admits a nowhere-zero $4$-flow. We prove that every graph with two edge-disjoint spanning triangle-trees has a flow strictly less than $3$.