Intersections of longest cycles in vertex-transitive and highly connected graphs

TL;DR

This paper advances understanding of longest cycle intersections in vertex-transitive and highly connected graphs, providing improved bounds and new combinatorial methods to address longstanding conjectures and problems.

Contribution

It strengthens bounds on cycle intersections, improves known results on vertex cuts, and introduces a novel cycle construction method for vertex-transitive graphs.

Findings

Improved vertex cut bounds from O(m^{8/5}) to O(m^{3/2})

Longest cycles in k-connected graphs intersect in at least (k^{2/3}) vertices

In vertex-transitive graphs, longest cycles intersect in an unbounded number of vertices as n grows

Abstract

Motivated by the classical conjectures of Lov\'asz, Thomassen, and Smith, recent work has renewed interest in the study of longest cycles in important graph families, such as vertex-transitive and highly connected graphs. In particular, Groenland et al.\ proved that if two longest cycles and in a graph share $m$ vertices, then there exists a vertex cut of size $O(m^{8/5})$ separating them, yielding improved bounds toward these conjectures. Their proof combines Tur\'an-type arguments with computer-assisted search. We prove two results addressing problems of Babai (1979) and Smith (1984) on intersections of longest cycles in vertex-transitive and highly connected graphs. First, we strengthen the bound of Groenland et al.\ by showing that if two longest cycles and in a graph share $m$ vertices, then there exists a vertex cut of size $O(m^{3/2})$ separating them. As a consequence, we show that in every \(k\)-connected graph, any two longest cycles intersect in at least \(\Omega(k^{2/3})\) vertices, improving the best known bound toward Smith's conjecture. Our proof is purely combinatorial, employing supersaturation-type estimates beyond the existing Tur\'an-type approach. Second, we prove that in every connected vertex-transitive graph on \(n\) vertices, any two longest cycles intersect in at least \(f(n)\) vertices for some function \(f(n)\to\infty\) as \(n\to\infty\), thereby resolving a problem of Babai (1979) for the class of vertex-transitive graphs central to his original motivation. In doing so, we introduce a new method for constructing longer cycles in vertex-transitive graphs based on a given cycle, which may be of independent interest.