On bicritical snarks
Snarks are bridgeless cubic graphs with chromatic index χ' = 4. A snark G is called critical if χ'(G-{v,w}) = 3, for any two adjacent vertices v and w. For any k ≥ 2 we construct cyclically 5-edge connected critical snarks G having an independent set I of at least k vertices such that χ'(G-I) = 4. For k = 2 this solves a problem of Nedela and Skoviera [6].
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...
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