On the existence of minimally tough graphs having large minimum degrees

TL;DR

This paper disproves a conjecture about the minimum degree of minimally tough graphs for planar and line graphs, providing new constructions and insights into the structure of such graphs.

Contribution

It constructs infinite families of minimally t-tough non-regular claw-free graphs with high minimum degree, disproving the generalized Kriesel conjecture for these classes.

Findings

Disproved the conjecture for planar and line graphs.

Constructed infinite families of non-regular claw-free graphs with high minimum degree.

Provided evidence that no fixed constant bounds the minimum degree in terms of toughness.

Abstract

Kriesel conjectured that every minimally $1$-tough graph has a vertex with degree precisely $2$. Katona and Varga (2018) proposed a generalized version of this conjecture which says that every minimally $t$-tough graph has a vertex with degree precisely $\lceil 2t\rceil$, where $t$ is a positive real number. This conjecture has been recently verified for several families of graphs. For example, Ma, Hu, and Yang (2023) confirmed it for claw-free minimally $3/2$-tough graphs. Recently, Zheng and Sun (2024) disproved this conjecture by constructing a family of $4$-regular graphs with toughness approaching to $1$. In this paper, we disprove this conjecture for planar graphs and their line graphs. In particular, we construct an infinite family of minimally $t$-tough non-regular claw-free graphs with minimum degree close to thrice their toughness. This construction not only disproves a renewed version of Generalized Kriesel's Conjecture on non-regular graphs proposed by Zheng and Sun (2024), it also gives a supplement to a result due to Ma, Hu, and Yang (2023) who proved that every minimally $t$-tough claw-free graph with $t\ge 2$ has a vertex of degree at most $3t+ \lceil (t-5)/3\rceil$. Moreover, we conjecture that there is not a fixed constant $c$ such that every minimally $t$-tough graph has minimum degree at most $\lceil c t \rceil$.